I’m standing side stage at the Boston Garden. I’ve just seen U2’s eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE show – it covers the optimistic power of innocence and the folly of experience. It’s a life looking forwards and backwards, to dark and light. It’s personal and it’s political. It’s Bono’s life. For the final number there’s no gratuitous group bow, no basking in audience adulation. It’s Bono alone with a single lightbulb, staring at a replica of the house he grew up in. A Bono dolls house.

He comes offstage dripping – a little breathy. Black jacket, black pants, black boots and a towel. We swoop into a black SUV. Other SUV’s are lined up behind but we’re number one.

A police escort will flank us as we speed through the city at night into the bowels of the hotel. But this moment is not just about rock star secrecy and protocol. It’s about looking at Bono, totally spent and soul baring. He talks in phrases about how he’s on the circumference of awkwardness about the reconstruction of the American Dream, not making sense. He’s undone by this show.

I hold his hand. His is a weak but intense grasp. Apparently, a lot of people loathe Bono. I can tell you that no-one has loathed Bono more than Bono has loathed himself, but more of that later.He can see the contradiction in his situation, raging conscience straddling galloping success

Usually it’s his wife Ali who collects him from the stage and puts him in the car. Once it was Oprah. Today it’s me, so if you don’t like Bono stop reading this now. We are friends. I’ve known him for 20 years since we first met over poached eggs in the Savoy several albums ago. I’ve seen him operate first hand in the White House during the Bush regime, I’ve seen him seem to shrink stadiums with his big charisma and soaring voice, I’ve seen him at home as a daddy, as a husband. But I’ve never seen him shake when he comes offstage.

I’m not reading this hand holding as a display of affection. It was more that he needed a hand to ground him. His eyes looked sad and careworn behind his lilac tinted glasses. He had a stubbly face which gave him definition but strangely also a vulnerability. It was as if his face was smudged.

We’re now in the bowels of the Ritz Carlton hotel but it could be any car park anywhere in the world. He is escorted to a lift that will take him to his floor and he will stay in his room. I go in another lift to the lobby where there’s a nice bar and various people who work for U2 are starting to congregate.

The Edge will come down and his wife Morleigh Steinberg who is a creative consultant for the show, but no other band members. They’re all in their 50’s. They’ve been on the road for 3 consecutive years and one senses that they need to preserve their energy for the next night’s show.

Adam Clayton, bass guitarist, gave up alcohol in the 90’s around the same time as he gave up supermodels. Larry Mullen, the drummer has never been a party animal. He’s much too reserved and now he has an hour of physio after the show because all that drumming takes it out on his arms, neck and back.

The next day I’m in Bono’s Penthouse suite. Room service has delivered lunch of chicken and greens. He takes the metal covers from our lunch and clashes them like cymbals.

There’s a clashing noise at the very start of the show where it mimics the deafening sound of an MRI scanner. It’s about facing death. Bono says, “It’s not a very sexy subject, mortality, is it? But what is sexy is being in a rock and roll band and saying here’s our new song, it’s about death.”

Yeah about as sexy as working the circumference of an embarrassment and awkwardness. He nods cheerily. “Yes, that’s right. The end of the show is when you go back to your house, the home you grew up in. You think that’s who you are. But I’m no longer in Cedarwood Road (the house that he grew up in). I’m now facing a different direction. Does it sound pretentious to say that we are an opera disguised as a rock n roll band?”

Yes, it does. “When opera first started out it was punk rock. Opera only became pretentious. Mozart had a punk rock attitude.”

Let’s maybe not say it’s opera. Let’s just say there are grand themes in the show and it’s not just a bunch of songs. “Right,” says Bono. There was a part in the show last night where he was saying how he lost his head along with Adam (Adam going off the rails is well documented) and then he continued, “and then it happened to The Edge and Larry later.” The Edge looked askance.

When did The Edge fall off the edge? “OK, I was just saying it because I was feeling a little mischievous. I don’t like seeing them looking smug. The Edge, a zen Presbyterian looked a little miffed and Larry looked ‘this could be true?’

He is laughing but he’s thinking seriously about change. “Who would want to stay the same is what I’m really talking about. If success means that you trade in real relationships and real emotions for hyper media centric ones then maybe success is not good. But that’s not what success has done for me. You have a dizzy moment where you think your daily toil is of interest to the general public then you realise it isn’t really.”

Kind of tough to be performing in stadiums and thinking that you’re of no interest to the general public. He corrects, “I mean early on in the 80’s I remember being very self-conscious and thinking what newspaper I choose to buy in the newsagent was going to define me. And I remember hanging out with Chrissie Hynde who was so totally herself at all times. It took me a few years to get there.”

He thinks he wasn’t himself for decades. “In public I had different selves and all of mine were pretty annoying. We went to the film Killing Bono and I said to the Edge about the actor playing me, what’s that accent he’s speaking in? That’s not my accent. And The Edge said ‘it’s not but it’s the accent you used to give interviews in.”

The actor must have researched it from old interviews. “It’s like people have a telephone voice, a telephone personality and I had one in the 80’s.”

We both talk in our telephone voices for a while and laugh at each other.

“What happened with my accent was that I had a Protestant mother and a Catholic father. Dublin Protestants tend to have less of an accent because of their Anglicised influence.”

Was this accent purposely odd so that people couldn’t define if he was Protestant or Catholic?

“I don’t know. To be clear I didn’t know I was doing it but if you have a musical ear you can take on any accent.”

I give him my famous accent test which is to talk with a Geordie, Welsh and Pakistani accent and then repeat and repeat and see how long it takes before they all become the same. And after that it’s Australian, New Zealand and South African. And because I’m winning he suggests we might do Dublin Northside and Dublin Southside.

“I had a fear early on when I moved to the southside of Dublin that my kids might have a southside accent and sound like spoilt brats. One night I was coming home with Ali to our house in Temple Hill when I heard a party going on up the road so I said Ali let’s go over and find out what the neighbours are like. She said ‘you can’t just walk in on them and’ I said just for a laugh. She went to bed and I wandered up the road and I walked in to this party. Some cool music, some uncool music, some friendly, some gave me some attitude. One of them, let’s just say he was called Cormac and he had a Mohawk and a bit of attitude and decided to give me some grief. Because I’m a successful singer in a big old rock band and this is 1988. And eventually he says in that Dublin 4 accent, the southside accent, ‘I’m an anarchist.” I grabbed him and lost my temper for a second and grabbed him and said, ‘Cormac, you’re a fucking estate agent,’ because I knew that’s what he’d grow into.

The next day Ali asked me how the party was and I said there was exactly the percentage of arseholes to really cool people that I grew up with in Cedarwood Road, no different.”

The blinding summer sun streams in and we’re submerged in the hot breath of the humidifiers. Bono doesn’t touch his lunch.

In a recent Rolling Stone interview Quincy Jones said that when he goes to Ireland Bono always insists that he stays in his castle because it’s so racist there. Which castle is this?

“I love Quincy. I saw him recently and gave him all the love I have in my heart but I don’t have a castle.”

He does have a Victorian folly at the end of his garden which Quincy may have stayed in. Most guests do. When I stayed there, there was a wall signed by President Clinton and Hillary.

“Now that I think about it he did tell me that he had some racist incidents in Ireland in the 60s and I said it’s not like that now. Come and stay with us.”

Quincy also said that U2 were never going to make a good album again because it was too much pressure. “Yes, and Paul McCartney couldn’t play bass. We’re all having these meltdowns apparently. Most people accept that the album we’ve just made, Songs of Experience is right up there with our best work. It certainly had the best reviews.” The single Love is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way is currently No.1 in the Billboard Dance Chart “which we haven’t been for a very long time.”

Despite what he says it must be a pressure to come up with songs like One or With Or Without You or New Year’s Day or In The Name of Love. Songs that have defined decades.

“One of the reasons U2 are so regarded in the US is because black artists like Quincy Jones have always championed us. And back in the day, Donna Summer. Our music wasn’t rooted in the blues and they found it fresh but also not alien. It’s in some ways harder you might argue to relate to it if you are an indie kid than if you are black and American.”

There’s a section of the show where we see a film showing the neo Nazi riots in Charlottesville. The desecration and reconstruction of the American Dream. This he tells me will be restructured for the European shows. How does he think the Nazi stuff will work in Europe when they start their tour in Berlin?

“We will rethink it but there’s plenty of Nazi’s right now in Europe. I think we can reimagine it with the same spine.” In fact, they decide to start the European shows with Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator. “Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers.”

“In many ways it’s a narrative based show. This is our story.” The show is personal and political. in the US it aimed to coalesce the centre and bring both sides into a common ground, as outsiders to the US they would not presume to critique. But it held up a mirror and was timely to what was happening there and then. Europe it is a different matter. It’s their home and inspiration. It’s what made them and it’s where they, their families and friends live their lives. Of course they’ll make statements about the rise of the far right. That’s their tradition. Rock n roll with a conscience.

Of course this show seems to be about Bono’s actual life, ono’s actual street that he grew up in etc. but it’s a metaphor for all of their lives. Ts his voice that carries their story. He speaks for all four of them, woven into a singular voice. Bono is the conduit and the lightning rod but it’s about all of their experiences. They are U2. They are a band. It’s not the Bono show although he is a showman extraordinaire.

“One of the stories we tell about ourself is about our country. Countries don’t actually exist, they are drawn. Part of coming to eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE is realising that history can change and what we are witnessing in the US right now is that it’s rewriting itself with darker tones. We’re here in search for America at a time where America is in search of itself. It’s happened a few times over the life of U2 but we are looking for the same thing the country is.”

U2 and Bono specifically has always been close to the American dream and those who dreamed it. Bill and Hillary Clinton were not only invited to his “castle” where he signed the wall – I saw it there. A + B = a bed for C. But only the other week Bono went to visit Bush apparently?

“I did. I saw the 44th president last week. If you do work with people you don’t just cut off from people. I’m still close with Obama (he hasn’t stayed in his castle) “but he and his missus and his kids have been in our local pub.

I don’t like to think of my relationships with these people as retail. I like to think that having gone through some stuff together we stay together even when they’re out of office.

I saw George Bush on his ranch. He spent $18 billion on anti-retroviral drugs and I had to thank him for that.”

Last week he also met Vice President Pence because he at some point was involved in PEPFAR Was he helpful?

“Well…we haven’t had the vicious cuts that the administration proposed. I would have to say that Congress have played the largest role in this.”

And what about the orange one? “I’m wise enough to know that any sentence with his name in it will become a headline so I just don’t use his name. It’s nothing personal. It’s just you have to feel you can trust a person you’re going to get into that level of work with. Lots of my leftie friends doubted I could work with George Bush but he came through as did Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – came through in a way that changed the world on development. If they had not made development a priority, other presidents would not have. They made the lives of the poorest a priority for rich nations. 45 million go to school because of debt cancellation.”

And the orange one? Is he with your plan? “No, he’s trying to cut all that stuff at the moment which is why I don’t want to be near him. If he’d put down the axe maybe we could work with his administration. But we can’t with the sword of Damocles hanging.”

We talk about Ivanka Trump and Bono says, “I have no doubt she has the intention to try and move the gender equality debate.”

As does Bono himself. At one part in the show there’s a screen saying ‘Poverty is Sexist’. The show takes place essentially in a round. A cage which sometimes encompasses the band is also used as a screen for the Anton Corbin film where in his potent trademark black and white film, we see children going to school, having their breakfast, wearing army helmets. A nation, a world at war where the children are in danger.

“We started Poverty Is Sexist a few years ago before the #metoo movement. We were getting messages actually from our daughters. You can’t solve the problems in the world using half the brain power that’s available. He worked closely with Harvey Weinstein on the Mandela movie Long Walk To Freedom (2013) where he won a Globe for the accompanying song Ordinary Love.

“He did very good work for U2. My daughters are very unforgiving in this regard whenever I get philosophical they tell me, ‘it’s not your time to speak on this.’”

I can’t tell if it’s sadness I see in his eyes or just tiredness but there’s still optimism, there’s still solutions.

“There are certain institutions that have kept the world in balance like The UN, The EU, The Breton Woods Institution, The World Bank, The IMF. All of these things whatever your position is on any of them you’ve got to admit that there’s a complete transformation of institutional norms as well as international behaviours. Whether you’re an artist, an economist or a voter you can’t not be interested. At least after Brexit, people are arguing, educating themselves.”

Isn’t it crushing to be such an optimist? “No, I’m cautious. For many people in the United States they are grieving after the last election. A death happened. A death of their innocence. And my attitude to that is it’s OK to wake up out of this naïve view of the world where we thought the human spirit would evolve naturally and the world was getting more fair. There is no evidence in 10,000 years to suggest that there’s a forward motion.

It was Dr King who said the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice. We don’t see evidence of that. I want to believe it’s true but in my lifetime there’s never been a moment like this where you actually think democracy is not a given.”

We talk of mothers separated from babies as they crossed the border and this action being backed up with biblical quotes. “The One campaign fights against the injustice of extreme poverty. People don’t arrive at the border risking life and limb without real purpose. We are Irish people who were economic refugees. We floated past the Statue of Liberty. The idea that we would be separated from our children when we got off the boat…..you could say the European Union was the invention of America. If you think about the post Second World War that was an investment in protecting and unifying Europe because the Americans were smart. General George C Marshall had the wisdom to invest because if we succeeded we would buy their products.”

The Innocence and Experience show is indeed about political grief as well as personal. One minute you’ve got Bono jumping around the room with the room service lids and the next he’s deeply sad.

He said that the poet Brendan Kennelly said he had to write every song as if he was already dead?

“Yes, to imagine yourself free of ego or concerns about what people think about you.”

Was this about his own near-death experiences? By this I don’t mean falling off his bike and having a 5 hour operation November 2014. After he broke his arm in 5 places and his eye socket. At the end of last year he was seriously ill.

“I mean I don’t want to speak about it but I did have a major moment in my recent life where I nearly ceased to be. I’m totally through it stronger than ever.”

He’s talking about this as if he had a decision in it. Did he have a choice whether he could go through it or not?

“No. I didn’t. It wasn’t a decision. It was pretty serious. I’m alright now but I very nearly wasn’t.”

No wonder this has changed the course of his songs, so many that question mortality, that others are letters to his children and wife, reflections, conversations with his younger self about how things could have been, should have been.

“Funnily enough I was already down the road of writing about mortality. It’s always been in the background.”

Sure it has. How could it not be? He was 14 when his mother died. Iris had a fatal aneurysm at a family funeral. He’s always liked to point out how many rock gods lost their mother like John Lennon. Initially he and Larry bonded over the death of their mothers. It was always in the background.

“And then it was in the foreground.”

Did he have a premonition that it was going to happen? “No but I’ve had a lot of warnings. A fair few punches over the last years.”

Like falling off the bike? “That was only one of them. There were some serious whispers in the ear that maybe I should have taken notice of. The Edge says I look at my body as an inconvenience and I do. I really love being alive and I’m quite good at being alive, meaning I like to get the best out of any day. The way I’m set up as an artist is I don’t see the songs as being art or the being in a band. I see life as being what you express yourself with. I certainly have a renewed vigour because it was an impasse. It was the first time I put my shoulder to the door and it didn’t open. I’ve always been able to do that and now I feel God whispered to me. Next time try knocking at the door or just try the handle. Don’t use your shoulder because you’ll break it.”

And this has had an impact on practical things like touring?

“Yes. I can’t do as much as I used to. On previous tours I could meet a hundred lawmakers in between shows and after the show and now I know that I can’t do that. This tour is particularly demanding and it asks of me that I prepare for it daily, that I concentrate on it so I can give myself completely. That’s why these shows are so great. I prepare for it and my voice is stronger than it has been. Have you heard about that Michael Gladwell book the 10,000 hours?”

It’s about you have to put 10,000 hours of work into something to be any good at it?

“I think we just got to 10,000 hours. It’s not genius. It’s just 10,000 hours. I’m not there yet but the band are. They are at their peak. Early on we were good, even great but I didn’t think we were and I didn’t tell them that and I was probably the weakest but I was the front man. I could grab attention. I could propel the songs. They’ve turned in their 10,000 hours and are on a whole other level right now. But nobody’s gonna tell me they saw U2 on another tour and they were playing better. It’s not gonna happen.”

Perhaps it’s because he has a feeling of completion. That it can’t get any better. If you start your show with an MRI and end it onstage alone with a solitary lightbulb, the metaphor is you come in and out of the world alone. He’s 58 but maybe he has lived his life in dog years.

“Everybody gets to this place. Whether you have a face-off with your own mortality or somebody close to you does, you are going to get to a point in your life where you ask questions about where you’re going.” Does that mean this is the peak? There won’t be another U2 tour after this?

“I don’t know. I don’t take anything for granted. U2 in this moment with these songs, these love letters, it’s some of our best work and I’m not sure that can be said about a lot of people who’ve been around this long.”

Bono has always lived in fear of U2 being dubbed a heritage act with greatest hits tours. Last year they did The Joshua Tree tour, not just the hits, they played the whole album.

“As if we’d never recorded the album. As if we’d put them out that year. It’s OK to acknowledge work you’ve done and give it respect, but if it’s the best we can do then we’re not an ongoing concern.”

He tells me that a critic once said ‘being at a Stones show makes people feel good but being at a U2 show makes people feel good about the person who’s standing next to them.’

I tell him the joy of being at a U2 show is that it just makes you feel who you are. The songs and visuals stretch your intellect as well as unfold your emotions.

He winds back to his personal apocalypse and I wonder if his younger self would be disappointed with his older self.

Would his younger self have approved of the album Songs of Innocence gifted to everyone on iTunes? Some people appreciated it more than others?

“We were experimenting. It was intended to be generous. The intention was never the over reach that it appeared to be. I’m not sure that my younger self would approve of where I’ve got to but I like to think that if my younger self stopped punching my face, my younger self would see that I’ve actually stayed true to all the things my younger self believed in. I’m still in a band that shares everything. I’m not just shining a light on troublesome situations, but trying to do something about them. I still have my faith, I’m still in love, I’m still in a band. What about your younger self?”

My younger self would say you fucked up on life, you fucked up on love, you loved all the wrong people at all the wrong times, you’ve been evil and destructive but hey, you’re in a Penthouse with Bono. My younger self would be yay, you made it!

Final word from Bono “You should be the singer of this band.”

Adam Clayton

I’m back in the Boston Garden Arena. In the winding bowels of the building the U2 production team weave seamlessly. They do this every day and most of them have been doing it for years with a level of loyalty that’s unquestioning. Most of the production staff are women, women who get things done. They pad about in dark jeans or cargo’s and Converse.

I first ventured backstage with U2 a couple of decades ago. There was a different uniform – a floaty maxi dress and platform shoes and women would run, not teeter in vertiginous heels across stadiums. Women no longer have to run in heels and it’s a statement U2 take on board.

I meet Adam Clayton in the guitar bunker beneath the stage. He gives me a tour of what goes on there. The Edge’s technician, Dallas Schoo, is lovingly poring over Edge’s 33 guitars, 25 which he uses every day. The bass guitars are less in number -about 18 but they make up for it in sparkle and Clayton has given them names.

There’s a lilac glitter guitar with a heavily studded strap that he calls Phil Lynott and a more gothic strap that he calls The Cure. They’re all lined up, ready for action. We climb up to the stage itself. I look out at the vast, empty arena and then clamber up into the long slim cage that wobbles. It’s where they perform a chunk of the show. The sides of the cage also double up as a screen for the films for the virtual reality footage and the political movies. I don’t like heights or enclosed spaces and Clayton, ever the gentleman, helps me down.

He’s wearing a Westwood T shirt and Sandalwood. His body is ripped, impressive. He likes to work out. He is 58. We part some makeshift curtains to do our interview which will happen at the same time as he’s having his physio. Soon he is naked but for a towel. The physiotherapist is on tour with the band and Clayton gets his massage before every show.

“I work out a lot – I run and do weight training in the morning so that tightens me up and then in the show carrying the bass and there are various other occupational quirks that affect the body. I have to make sure they don’t develop into real problems. It was a bit of a shock to learn that the things you could do in your twenties and thirties in terms of being a player, when you get into your forties and fifties, they cause repetitive strain injuries.”

Does he mean carpal tunnel? He’s playing his bass and his fingers won’t move?

“Exactly. But actually for me more of an issue is what it does to my hips and lower back, shoulders and neck. You just get so tight you can’t turn, you can’t move. When you go on stage you don’t want to be feeling those things.”

Hargen the physiotherapist is German and he speaks with a German Irish accent. He’s got strong hands that seem to know what they’re doing. Watching someone be massaged is quite meditative.

“It is. You make sure that your channels are open when you’re onstage. You don’t want random thoughts coming through your mind.”

Of course, there was a time in the nineties where Clayton was full of random thoughts and random excesses. The polite gentleman went wild. Fell in love with Naomi Campbell. His man part was the cover of ZOO TV, his inherent shyness replaced by rampant exhibitionism. He’s come a long way since then. He’s married to Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho, a Human Rights lawyer and has a new baby, Alba and his addictions end at exercise, designer T shirts and the perfect Sandalwood scent.

He’s more than come through it. He’s a spectacular player and he owns the stage. His bass guitar strut looks far from tight or injured. He’s pleased when I tell him his 10,000 hours show.

“Ah yes, from Gladwell.” He smiles. Random thought comes into my head. Why does it seem normal to interview a man who’s naked except for a towel, talking about sonic perfection?

“I use only about 6 or 7 guitars. Edge uses 30 different ones. He’s the one seeking perfection sonically. When we started from 1976 onwards, the sound of the punk band was the most aggressive and powerful thing that a teenager could hear and all the bass players were stars. It was much cooler than the guitar so from that point of view – I was. We are also a little more mysterious at the back. I’m a big fan of bass and drum. I realise it’s a bit niche. These days most modern records are programmed and synthesised bass and drums. It’s not real.”

Clayton likes the real thing. “Larry has special needs because for 40 years he’s been pounding something that has been resisting him. He has to get physio done an hour before the show and an hour after. He’s in pain and his muscles need to function properly. Drumming is the most physically debilitating thing you can do. These are things you do in your twenties and thirties. It’s the equivalent of a sports career where you shouldn’t really be doing it past the age of 35 but nobody knew that when rock n roll started and nobody realised it could be a long career. I guess the jazz players of the thirties and forties might have found that out and those people probably weren’t making enough to have doctors to help them. They probably medicated with heroin.”

Does he ever medicate? “If my neck is tight and painful I’ll take an Aleve (like paracetamol).”

Onstage it looks pure and loose but now I’ve learnt it takes a lot of massaging. Three consecutive tours have had an accumulative effect. It won’t continue like that.

“I don’t think so. It’s been good for the band’s playing and the band’s tightness and when you see how much Edge does – singing, keyboards, guitar, Edge is at the top of his game. Bono has learnt to master, to dominate these stages, but we’re due a break. The Joshua Tree tour was a runaway train. We extended it because it was popular and it suited our schedule because our album release date was moved. A lot of people work harder than we do but I think we need a break now. Being in front of audiences that are enthusiastic is an amazing pay off but being away from home for most of the year is gruelling.”

I was only on the road for a few days and I feel a strange kind of exhaustion from travel and from never being never alone. It’s a weird thing. Clayton is looking forward to a holiday “with the rest of the lads with the South of France.” They all have houses near to each other on the French Riviera. Extraordinary that they not only work together but want to holiday together.

“Yes, it’s perverse.” Is that some kind of masochistic syndrome? “No, what really works is we’ve known each other for a long time. Everyone now has children and there’s a whole group of friends that revolve around it so it’s a community and it’s nice to spend time together.”

They all still like each other? “Yes, I’m very grateful for it. I still think that Bono and Larry and Edge are the most fascinating people in my life. They constantly surprise me in terms of their insight, their development, their intelligence. When you find people like that you hang onto them.

We haven’t done anything to embarrass our younger selves. We were young guys coming out of the suburbs of Dublin that didn’t know anything but had a certain idealism of how we thought the world should be and we’ve honoured that. Our tours have always been based on more than crash, bang, wallop and video effects. They’ve meant something.

You learn things as you’re going. Trying to eat as healthily as you can and being in a healthy frame of mind helps you. We have an on the road chef who knows what we should be eating. I’ve gone vegetarian. I’ve heard so much about the meat processing business that I don’t trust anything. I’ve got high levels of mercury in my blood so I don’t eat fish. I’ve not drank for twenty years and that was a completely different life but I notice other people are heading that way. There’s now a theory in the UK that even one drink is harmful to you. I think that’s a bit extreme and a bit of a buzz wrecker but it does seem that alcohol is being thought of as possibly causing cancer.”

Not very rock n roll, is it. But maybe that’s old rock n roll where it was all about living for the moment, doing lines and drinking shots…all night. And now the challenge is longevity and not losing relevance.

After the show in the hotel bar in a cordoned off area, there will still be champagne and The Edge will be the only band member socialising because Edge never does extreme.

Clayton continues, “The longer you are off it the easier it is but I can never have just one. I see people who drink half a glass of wine and I get anxious thinking how can you leave that other half? But there are those people who can have just one glass and leave it and people who the minute they have one they’re off and their mood changes. It’s a powerful drug and a powerful industry. I wonder if the legalisation of marijuana is going to be competitive.”

They have worked the last four summers, either touring or recording. Clayton looks forward to family time and enjoying his daughter’s first birthday. It’s hard to tell if I’m sensing that this could be the end or whether he’s just looking forward to the break.

“Albe really does love banging musical instruments. And she has an eye for looking at the light and noticing. I’m happy to say that there are strong signs that there is an artistic soul in there.”

I’m wondering if his massage therapist has remote superpowers. It has relaxed me too. Clayton’s is the most sophisticated sandalwood. It doesn’t punch you. it gives you a comforting embrace. Edge 56 Bono 58

Larry Mullen was in fact the founder of the band. Mulen is still the heartbeat. Nothing happens without him. He provides dignity, strength. He also has a Dorian Gray thing about him. He’s always looked much younger than his 56 years. He’s always fit and I’ve always loved those drummer’s arms. As we chat in the Boston Garden Arena before the show, he tells me that these days those arms don’t come easy and neither does the drumming. He has to work out, he has to have intense physio.

“It’s not so rock n roll but it’s what you have to do to get yourself up to this. I don’t come from that kind of discipline – the same as the jazz drummers. Technically it’s complicated and physically it’s a different thing.”

He means he’s not the kind of jazz drummer who sits mellow and still and only the arms move. “I’m a street drummer. When you throw yourself about and after doing it for a long time you just can’t quite do it in the same way.”

For Mullen, constant touring has been hard and not just on the arms. In the nineties after a huge tour he simply took off on his motorbike and disappeared with some kind of reaction against the band and also an inability to cope with being home, but that’s long since been worked through. He’s had ambitions to further his acting career. I’m sure his deep, thoughtful presence is an interesting cinematic one. He has had parts in the films Man on the Train in 2011 with Donald Sutherland and A Thousand Times Goodnight with Juliette Binoche in 2013.

“We’ll finish this out and then there will be time to decide what we want to do next. I’d like to take a really long holiday.”

There’s something in the way he says it, not just tiredness, that make me think maybe this really is it.

“I don’t know. You never know. I assume there’ll be another album. I don’t know when and I’d like to think we have some time to consider it. I don’t know that anybody needs a U2 record or a U2 tour anytime soon. People could do with taking a break from us and vice versa.”

Will he try to resume acting? “I’d like to but I had to put all that stuff on hold. The problem is if the tour gets changed the album gets released at a different time, all bets are off. My agent said ‘I can’t do this because you’re just not available so I think I will re-employ the agent and tell them I won’t be doing this for a couple of years. I’d like to do something else.”

Shouldn’t the agent have kept him on the books? “Well, in fairness it was difficult. I wasn’t answering the phone.”

And that’s Mullen for you. He’s not an answering the phone type.

While Mullen goes for his physio I am in catering perusing selections of cheesecake and pasta and soup. I meet Willie Williams the shows creative director over bowls of spaghetti.

This is his twelfth world tour with U2. “What’s been fantastic about working with U2 for so long apart from the fact that they are who they are, is that they’ve always done big, ambitious projects. Then they take a hiatus so I’ve been able to have my own life back and I don’t feel it’s been taken over.”

Williams recently has installed lighting for the Hakkasan group in Vegas. He has designed a centrepiece – a spaceship chandelier at Caesar’s Palace.

Williams also constructed the Innocence tour which was similar in its staging but it’s interesting to see in three years how much technology has moved on.

“For them it’s about finding the connection between spectacle and emotion. We tweak the show as it goes along. The joy of this show is we start with a narrative. We spoke for a long time about the band growing up in Dublin and honing their story so we could tell the experience part of the journey.”

At the time we speak, he is redesigning the show for Europe – the general theme will be Europe at a time of crisis. The European flag will replace the US flag. That should be nicely controversial in Brexit Britain.

There is a cityscape for every night which is redone for every city of the tour. When I see the show this time, Bono has selected different seats for me because he wants me to see other aspects of the show. His attention to detail is like that. For me, it was interesting to watch the stage after having been under it and on it.

After the show we’re back in the hotel bar. It’s Edge and Morleigh’s wedding anniversary. We all eat handmade chocolate cake. It’s a group of people who know each other really well and can move instinctively and swiftly with each other.

The next day we all travel from Boston to New York on Amtrak. U2 have reserved an entire carriage for cast and crew. Once we arrive, the set must be built immediately at Madison Square Garden for their 4-day residency. Edge is the only band member on the train – the others all left after the gig last night to see their families. Edge’s wife and daughter are here with him. Did he give Morleigh a gift for their wedding anniversary?

“You get special dispensation when you are on the road – she is with me and that is the best present.”

He’s very smiley when he talks about family and equally smiley when he talks about guitars. Does he really use 33 each night?

“It’s possible.”

We talk about how in the early days he only used one guitar which meant that Bono had to hit some very high notes.

“These days we try not to do that to him, we try to save his voice. He does hit some very high notes. He has a good range. A ‘B’ would be his top note these days but he has hit ‘C’ which is what a top tenor would hit, which is very, very high – an opera singer would hit that maybe once a night.”

I sense a strong concern for Bono.

“Bono has a very ambivalent attitude to his physical self. He doesn’t naturally take responsibility for his physical well-being, he is more about other things and the body just comes along with it. Which is fine in your 20s but you get to a certain point… somebody once said for the first 30 years your body looks after you and supports you then you have to look after your body. It is a difficult shift for him.

“It is a difficult shift for anybody who is living in the moment, considers himself an artist. It’s about being current, being present. If you spend too much time thinking you are old and past it you probably can’t do it anymore.”

This is the dilemma they all face. Take care of themselves but not so much care that they are over thinking it.

On the road places them in a kind of cocoon. They’re with your rock n roll family doing the things that they always do. It’s not so much holding back the years but not acknowledging their existence. If they think about being old, it becomes difficult to feel relevant.

We see passengers on the platforms peering in. Perhaps they can spot the odd vacant seat in our carriage. They wonder why they can’t get in. You feel set apart, not so much alienated but special.

“As you can see, it’s a family experience on the road, we are surrounded by the people we love so it’s not as alienating as you think although I am not under any illusions that we are not to some extent institutionalised by being a member of U2. How could you not be?”

The train rocks along.

“I must say I am really looking forward to not being on the road.” (They have a break before their European tour starts August 31 in Berlin). “I am sure there will be a withdrawal of a certain type but I think the minute you feel being on the road is normal is when you know you have got to get home fast.”

“The physio keeps us from not getting in trouble in the physical sense. What we do as a guitar player or drummer is use the body in a very unnatural way. It’s like a tennis player; there is a lot of asymmetrical movement. Your body will change shape to make that the norm which plays havoc… I get to the gym when I can, I am not a big believer in heavy weights and the like, I care more about flexibility. I used to do yoga.”

Edge isn’t fanatical about the gym, he’s not fanatical about anything. He is measured, he has always been the balance of other band members excesses.

Does he have Morleigh on the road with him the whole time?

“No, I wish. She was director in residence for a while when Willie was away. She was our eyes and ears in the audience and helped tinker with the show. It’s a constant process trying different things and she has helped Bono over the years with his use of the stage. Her background is modern dance so it’s all about the visual medium; the shape of the show.”

Their daughter Sian is very smart and engaging. It’s her image that is used for the Poverty is Sexist visual and she’s also on the cover of the album along with Eli Hewson. Last night in the bar, she and I bonded over dyslexia.

“I am sort of dyslexic when it comes to music,” says Edge. “I am totally instinctive. I use my ear and am not technically proficient. I am very lazy so I know just enough music theory to get by.”

The other night on stage he looked perplexed when Bono said that he and Adam had gone off the rails and it happened to Edge later.

When did that happen? He laughs, knowing that he has never gone off the rails. The eyebrows arch as he briefly ponders just how devastating that would have been, not just for him but for the rest of the band.

“I have been pretty together through the years – I am sure we have all had our moments and lost our perspective and started to buy into the bullshit. That’s the hardest thing, to hold on to the perspective. The general rule is that everybody involved in any endeavour always overestimates their own importance while simultaneously undervaluing everyone else; once you realise that you can start catching yourself.”

I even caught myself feeling put out because the second night at the hotel the U2 crew did not have the whole bar to themselves as we’d had the first night. We were given a cordoned off area within the bar. And that is me after two days. How could I become so arrogant after such a short time?

“Good question. I think we all have that tendency to enjoy being made a fuss of. It’s a Seamus Heaney phrase, ‘Creeping Privilege’ you have got to look out for it because it can turn you into a monster or somebody who needs help, a victim. And you don’t want to be that.” He laughs his wise laugh.

“That is the good thing about being a band member, we all spot each-others tendencies to go off track. We are peers and equals. Which is not a given because solo artists have no peers or equals.

“We are not afraid of bad news. In the beginning we had to work hard to get anywhere, it was always a struggle. That’s just how it feels, we enjoy the fight and the internal struggle to get where we feel we need to go and a sense that we have got to fight for our position to maintain where we are at creatively and literally.”

Edge has optimism. Edge sees the past, sees the future and would never let U2 become a heritage act.

“Yes, and we should not feel entitled. Because the other part of this creeping privilege is that you get to the place that you think you are entitled just because you are a name and you’ve been around a long time.”

They keep each other in check. Do they actually criticise each other?

“It generally doesn’t have to be said, it just becomes clear. That’s the nature of our band culture. These things get figured out. There have been very few times when we have had to have what you might call an intervention. It’s basically what friends do for each other because that what we are; a bunch of friends. And even when we are not touring we will all be in the south of France with each other. Recently I have been mostly between Dublin and Venice, California. I am trying to build a house in Malibu but not having much luck. Hopefully in the future I will be there. Meanwhile, we are renting a place in Venice, low key, not a big house on a street. It’s grounding.”

“Touring to me is not the same as travel because you are in a bubble. I still try to get out even if it’s just going for a walk in a park, a bit of shopping, maybe a bar, there is something really educational about travelling. Our kids have to travel to see their dads and I’ve watched how their attitude to the world opens and their acceptance of difference is just a natural by-product of seeing the world. It’s healthy. Being insular in your own little group is not.”

“We have made two of the most personal and introspective albums of our entire career but the show is very political so I am hoping to open it up in more Euro Centric ways. But the music, that’s personal.”

The political only becomes meaningful when it relates to the personal. There is of course a bond between the Americans and the Irish. A statistic claims there are 40 million people of Irish heritage in the US. The desecration and reconstruction of the American dream is also an Irish dream. The European tour will be different because the European dream doesn’t exist in the same way.

“We are hoping for a global dream which is hopelessly idealistic. Let’s start with getting the West on the right footing. If you are ready to look into it on a deeper level an anthropological level you will find that during times of crisis people instinctively reach for the monster they think is going to protect. That can be a movement or an individual. In the US it seems to be a bit of both. For sure the orange one with the help of some very smart advisors has tapped into a movement of disaffection which has clearly been brewing for 20 years.

“I was just in Washington on Capitol Hill, all these neoclassical edifices – the statement is of power. Not the power of an emperor or a king but the power of the state. If you are a miner and you are in Washington worrying that you’ve lost your job or health care it would be so intimidating. Someone like Trump talks to the guy at the end of the bar somehow you relate to him. This is a guy who is pretending to represent ever man and he is the most elitist. So many levels of irony. If you look at the longer arc of history what we are seeing now is a backward step.

“The actual drift is in this direction and a positive thing but it relies on respect in the sense of pluralism which is my culture, your culture; my religion, your religion. People have very strong religious ides which we find crazy, dinosaur deniers. Some people who have whacky thoughts; extreme Christians, extreme Muslims to be able to understand where they are coming from and not demonize or look down on them and not say, ‘Your reality is not as valid as my reality’. The problem is that the divisions are big. Europe, weirdly enough on some levels, has less diversity than America. Europe is post Christian for the most part, in America they share a common language but a huge diversity of world vision. In Europe we have cultural difference, linguistic differences, political differences. If we keep our never EuropeEloper can survive and we can all pull together. Brexit is, of course, a bit of a set-back, but we’ll figure it out.

“Picture us at 16 or 17, we were a really awful, terrible band. We managed to persuade the powers that be to let us play a short set in the school disco. I remember everybody gathering into a little room in a panic because we realised, of the songs we were about to perform we had never managed to get to the end of any of them. So now we can get through the songs and we have sold a few records, we have had a long observance in the same direction and that has gotten us where we are. In other words, total blind thinking.”

They started off with the very smart thinking Paul McGuiness as their manager, who remained from the start until 5 years ago.

“To be fair, we found him. He had done a little bit of management of a Dublin band but his day job was in the world of advertising, commercials, assistant director, he had worked on a couple of movies.”

It was his concept that the band should split everything equally four ways. This levelling seems to have been genius thinking. So many bands split up because of egomania and in band rivalry.

“It was a piece of genuine wisdom – he had heard why so many bands disintegrated. It took us about three minutes to consider and go, ‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’”

We talk about science because he’s intrigued where intuition and science meet, the logical brain and the poet brain. They meet in The Edge’s brain.

When the train pulls into Penn station we head off in opposite directions. I’m already sad to leave behind my rock and roll cocoon. Feels like family. I already miss the fact I won’t have a show to watch that night. People to meet after the show…. talk about guitars and lost dreams and reconstructed ones……what if it really is the end?

I meet Goldie Hawn in Santa Monica. It’s one of those Hockney-esque days – blue sky and palm trees. Everything you’d expect. I expected Goldie to be blonde and cute and somehow frozen in time. I expected a little facial landscaping, but there’s none of that It’s hard to believe that it’s been 15 years since Goldie Hawn made a movie (The Banger Sisters), because somehow she’s one of those actors who has a continued presence. People are always being compared to her and she’s often photographed with her very famous (Almost Famous) daughter Kate Hudson. You never know which on screen star is going to be frosty and who’s going to be lovely. Goldie does not disappoint in the warmth department. She radiates it along with calm and Zen.

She’s back on screen playing Amy Schumer’s mother in Snatched. It’s already been touted as the funniest film of the year – Hangover style comedy but women driven. Schumer fought hard to get Hawn to play her mother. They didn’t know each other before. Schumer just knew it would be right and when you think about it, although Hawn didn’t give birth to Schumer, without Hawn Schumer could not have existed. Hawn was the Schumer of the seventies. She did it in a quieter, defter and more svelte way, but nonetheless she was a woman allowed to be funny, in control and take the lead in movies. For instance, if you wanted to remake Private Benjamin, you’d get Schumer to play Hawn’s role. Biologically no relation, but there’s something filmically genetic about these two.

Hawn is in a little black dress – slash neckline, bare, pale, freckled legs, strappy sandals, I glimpse a heart tattoo peeking out on her foot. The hair is the same – Goldie hair. It’s long and it’s blonde and it’s tousled. The lips too are still as pouty. You notice her face is real, not plastic. You notice multi-coloured grey blue green, sparkling eyes. Orbital. She’s just had room service delivered to her hotel suite. It’s your typical Los Angeles fare. Green juice, almond butter with gluten free crackers – except she’s been drinking green juice for 20 years. “I make it at home and sometimes I put mint in it, sometimes zucchini, always apple and ginger. It’s so cleansing.” Somehow when she’s describing it, it sounds cosy. She didn’t jump on the green juice bandwagon. She created it. She was always ahead of her time.

Born in 1945, 71 years ago to a Jewish mother and Presbyterian father, Hawn never dreamed big for herself. “I came to California to dance. It sounds silly because everybody wants to be a big deal and I just wanted to dance, to be married. I was very connected to my family and I was fully prepared to go home at some point.” In fact she was rather surprised when she found herself being applauded in Hollywood. She says she didn’t have drive, so it was confusing and it actually made her feel anxious and misplaced. Other people saw in her something she didn’t see in herself. A very rare commodity of someone who is extremely funny and extremely pretty. By that I mean she looked too pretty to be funny but she was.

Discovered on popular sketch show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In – she came to Los Angeles at the age of 22 to make her first movie There’s A Girl in My Soup. She found her success baffling. That’s why she was not distressed in the least by her absence from the screen for the past 15 years. She’s been busy doing other things that interested her more. The Goldie Hawn Foundation is a foundation for children to help them triumph over trauma using her meditation techniques. “A frightened child can never learn,” she has said. Her mindful techniques have been used in schools all over the US and Australia.

She’s also been a devoted grandmother to Kate Hudson’s boys Ryder, 13 and Bingham, 5, Kate’s brother Oliver and his children Wilder, 9, Bodhi, 7 and Rio, 3. And now without even trying she’s back, blockbuster back. “I’m excited. It’s very funny and it’s also very heartfelt.” That’s what she does best. Mixes the fun with the heart. “It’s a fine line you know.”

Schumer and Hawn’s onscreen chemistry is remarkable. Did she end up wanting to adopt Amy at the end of the movie? “Oh, I have adopted her in my heart anyway. I love her.” And they didn’t know each other before? “No, I didn’t know Amy although we met on an airplane once.” (Hawn didn’t really recognise her). She seems to meet quite a few people on planes. She met her ex-husband Bill Hudson on one and it went from a glint in the eye to full passion, marriage, envy, divorce. But more of that later.

“When I met Amy on the plane I didn’t recognise her. I’m not much of a TV watcher but then we met at an event in London – the Glamour Awards. I was there because my daughter Kate was getting an award and Amy was also getting an award. She came up to me and said “There’s this movie I read and I’m helping rewrite it but I can only see you in it and I really want you to do this movie.” Hawn indicates that she seemed quite surprised and then thought about it. “I had been working with my Foundation for around 13 years so I thought let me turn this baby into a teenager and I can go back to work and have some fun.”

So there was never a conscious decision that she was giving up movies and concentrating on the Foundation? “That’s right. There wasn’t. And was there a decision to give up the Foundation and return to acting? “No. The movie was 3 months. It was the right time. I was ready to go back and do something funny. When you’ve been working for 40 years at being funny there comes a moment where you look at your life and say who am I now and where do I want to go? Do I want to continue to repeat myself or do I want to do something different? I want my life to be enriched by different actions, not just by one thing. That’s why I have developed and produced scripts for children that can go into schools. It was exciting to me. And now it’s exciting to be back.”

Did she ever feel like she’d been boxed into being the funny girl? A pressure to amuse? “Oh no. I never felt that it was a pressure to be funny. I don’t look at myself as someone who has to entertain people, who HAS to be funny. I’m an actress who can be comedic. I’ve never done stand up or anything like that. I started off as a dancer. First of all ballet and then jazz and I was that girl who got pulled out of the chorus line. The next thing I knew I had an agent and I ended up on a big television show (Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In). It really was just a shocker. My career took me. I didn’t take my career. And what happens when you get older happens to everybody – the roles start changing. I worked into my 50s and I thought – wait a minute. There is a finite amount of life left. What am I gonna learn? How am I going to help? What do I care about? And that’s when ideas began to percolate of how to create a different life. Not for me but for children. That has always been my plan. It’s been the most exciting part of my life and the hardest. I wanted to help children who are afraid. I wanted to stabilise my emotions and therefore I wanted to help stabilise children’s. I know about being scared, whether it’s bullying or something outside for that. When I was little I feared the bomb.”

She grew up in the Cold War period and her school showed one of those Cold War propaganda movies when she was 11. After that she was then terrified to go to school and woke up every day thinking it was the end of the world. “It stayed with me. It was very impactful. I wasn’t ready for that, all the devastation and people bloody and children crying. How is a child going to react to that? I was 11 and I remember thinking I’ll never live to kiss a boy, I’ll never live to be a mum. I was very anxiety ridden.”

It was a similar anxiety that made her feel misplaced stayed when she had her plucked out of the chorus line moment. She felt her life wasn’t her own. Somehow there was a link between not having control of her life and a fear of death. “Yeah it was fear of death and violence. What could be more scary than a bomb falling from the sky and falling on you?”

Her early success was a metaphorical bomb. She had felt anxious most of her early life and that’s when she discovered meditation therapy. The success meant she didn’t know who she was anymore. “I felt unstable. My life wasn’t working out as I planned. I wanted to have a dance school for children, to be married and have a house in Washington DC. Being married was my dream. It didn’t happen that way. I did one show and boom. I’m away from everybody I love and I’m in LA and my mom and dad were in Washington. I thought I would go back to them but life kept keeping me away.

And then I realised, Goldie, you are literally never going home again. My dad would write me letters and say “The umbilical cord has stretched 3,000 miles. Just know we love you. We are always here. Just try to enjoy this.” That was it for a while then everyone moved out West – my mom, my dad, my sister.

My dad was Presbyterian. He didn’t go to church. My mother was Jewish. We rarely went to the synagogue but oddly enough I was the one most interested in religion. It was very clear that the Jewish part was strong because it had all the rituals of our family. It was a cultural thing. At the same time my best girlfriend was a Catholic. I went to the Catholic Church with her more than I went to the Synagogue, but sometimes I would go to both. Friday night Synagogue and Sunday church. I find religion so interesting. Now I’m interested in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jain. I also like the Kabbalah but more than that I’ve always been very connected to the idea of meditation.” It seems that meditation gave her answers, or at least some answers.

It’s as if she was always trying a place to fit and at the same time she was rather a contradiction. Everyone thought of her as the hilarious blonde. Meanwhile she was thinking about death and eternal life. Was she aware of that juxtaposition? “Yeah. Unexpected right and then I took a course in neuro science because to me that was the answer to the brain’s function. How you shift your brain because of neuroplasticity.” Er, what? “Neuroplasticity is all about how you grow new connections in the brain. The brain is plastic. We can move the brain by our thoughts, our actions by often repetitive actions so you can train your brain to grow new cells.”

I saw this on an Andrew Marr programme about how was retraining his brain to walk after a stroke. Hawn nods enthusiastically. “You can train your brain to become conscious of certain things just like the mind and body are conscious of one another. There is communication between them. I love the idea that there is a communication between thought and remoulding the mind – the brain if you will and how that begins to help you be more in control of your brain rather than it controlling you.”

She continues with another couple of sentences involving the word peptides but I’m way out of my depth. This is not what I was expecting to be discussing with Goldie Hawn. I try to simplify, take us away from science. Is she saying if you fear something, the fearful thoughts make it happen? “Exactly. You can look at a painting. You can see different things. I was I India many years ago and they have these beautiful caves dug in the salt rock. One cave was the Jain, one was the Buddha and one was the Hindu cave. In the Buddha cave, they held a light to the Buddha’s face and he looked peaceful. When the light turned in the other direction he looked angry.”

Suddenly there’s the sound of Indian chanting and I realise it’s Hawn’s mobile ringtone. She laughs. “Isn’t it perfect? Anyhow, that’s how I started looking into how the brain works.”

In which parts of her life did she find her meditation therapy and her knowledge of the brain’s workings to be most useful? The blue grey green eyes glitter. Dealing with being suddenly famous? “Yes.” Divorce. “Yes. It helped me through my mother’s death. It helps every day. We have a tendency to want a miracle to happen when we’re suffering but I think we need to suffer for a limited period of time. When someone dies who is close to you, you have to go through it. I don’t believe in jumping over the river to try and cleanse yourself through it. That’s kind of a denial.”

When her mother died – she says it was in 93 or 94 – she took time out of acting just to be with her. They were very, very close. She saw the pain and suffering of her loss as a way of remaining connected to her mother. She nods. “In some form yes and that’s what it was. I spent a lot of time on my spiritual journey when she died. I’m not over it. I miss her every day, but it took a year of really not being over it. The Jews believe it takes a year. That’s why they have a stone setting a year after the death. I swear to God she was there at her graveside.

The Rabbi did his prayer, our family were holding hands and a wind came out of nowhere, whoosh and it was as if my mother was saying it’s OK now. I cried. It was the end of mourning and the beginning of my holding my mother close to me all the time. It was just different. I want to help people through things like this. You have to feel it, not deny it. Take it with you and work it out. Meditation has helped me through tiredness, stress, work issues, relationship issues. You know when we react to a situation that we wish we hadn’t reacted to – we were just firing off. It helps you with that reacting because if you can take 10 seconds more to think about things it’s an amazing tool.”

It seems like by the time she got to her relationship with Kurt Russell she’d worked quite a few things out. It continues to compel people – Goldie and Kurt – the longest lasting Hollywood couple – 34 years but never married. In the past she said that maybe it wouldn’t have lasted so long if they had been married. “Definitely,” she nods. “Relationships are hard. None of them are easy. Both Kurt and I had gotten out of a relationship that was basically all about money and we both looked at each other and we were like ‘marriage – no way’. What’s yours is yours, what’s mine is mine. We’re going to do this thing separately and we’re going to be together. We’re going to enjoy each other. There’s no marriage here. Marriage binds you lawfully that in a way that suddenly you’ve got to give up your money. Kurt was married for three and a half years and he had to give up all his money, his house and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was married and my ex sued me for everything after 4 years. The laws are like that.”

I had heard of a book that Bill Hudson wrote, a kind of kiss and tell without many kisses. I read an extract where he was whining about money. Did she ever read it? “No no no. It’s too bad. I mean it’s over. But these things make me feel more compassionate. Isn’t that interesting? The kids are great and it’s forgotten. But that was a funny story how you met him on a plane and ended up marrying him. “My God he was great. He was a lot of fun. He was very, very funny. There were really good qualities about him but then he was gambling and all sorts of things and it didn’t work.”

It was very different when she met Kurt. There was no crazy coup de foudre. It was a slow burn of boiling sweetness. They met when they co-starred in the movie Swing Shift. “Yeah,” she says tinged with a dreamy nostalgia. “You know when we fell in love? It was when I realised loved the way he looked at my children. Frankly that was it. That’s what made me fall in love with him. It wasn’t one of those…” she’s searching for the word “lust at first sight things. No. not that at all. I mean we were very sexually attracted to each other but I was at a stage of my life where I had finally excepted my little white picket fence dream did not work out. I’d had two divorces and I wanted something that was going to be good for my life and my children.”

We’re inside but it had been so sunny I was wearing my sunglasses. “Who made them?” she wants to know. “Kate was only 3 and Oliver was 6. Kurt is very special. We raised the children together and we’ve been together 34 years and had a great time doing it. We lived 3 years in Vancouver (because Kurt and Goldie’s son Wyatt was playing ice hockey there) and we’ve spent two and a half years building a house in LA and I had my third night’s sleep there last night. All kinds of stuff needs doing.” They moved back to Los Angeles for Wyatt’s career. “Wyatt’s an actor now. All my children are amazing and very, very talented. Oliver’s had some successful TV shows and he’s got 3 children. I’ve got so much to be grateful for and everybody’s excited that I’m doing a movie.”

Will this be the start of more acting work for her? “It’s hard to know. It depends what comes up. Careers have resurgences but you don’t recreate your career. Not at my time of life.” She’s 71. Of course she doesn’t look 71 and she doesn’t look a Hollywood 71 either. Jonathan Levine, the director of Snatched announced that Goldie Hawn was the fittest person on the set.

So how did she get to be the fittest person on the set? Does she have a ballet routine to keep her in shape? Does she still dance? “I don’t, but I did have a ballet barre put into my workout room this time so I will be doing more plies and working at the barre.” I tell her I did that for a couple of months and it was tell. “It’s very hard. Those slow plies, they’re hard. There was nothing like that in the movie. There was lots of running around and whatever but I’m used to that. Nothing new.”

It ends in a way that there could be Snatched 2. “Yeah there could be. You never know.” In 1996 she, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton did the movie First Wives Club. At the time when most big earning movies were sci fi movies or movies that were tailored to the adolescent male audience. It was quite a brave time to make a movie with three women in their fifties. “Yes it was.” They all did it for minimal money. Small front end, small back end just to get it made. When it was a huge hit, the studio wanted a sequel and they expected them all to do it for the same low fees. Were they insulted? “Yes. I couldn’t believe it. We’ll just give you the same amount of money and I thought to myself, no. Everyone negotiates for a sequel because you’ve already built a constituency. People love your characters, they know you. That’s a value. You can’t put anyone else in that movie.”

Do you think they would have treated men like that? “Not at all.” We ponder about what’s changed in the last 20 years in Hollywood. Ostensibly can women be sexy and funny and earn as much as their male counterparts? My theory is that Amy Schumer has been quite a game changer. She’s the one who can get movies made. She can negotiate a good sequel, she’s made it possible for a new generation of women to be laughed at in a good way.

“Exactly. She has. We keep inching along, two steps forward, one step back. It’s not even that long ago when women weren’t allowed to vote but there’s still some of those diehards that look at women as objects and also find them in many ways a threat. So many men today have changed. Young men today are very different but some of the old dogs still have that lack of regard for a woman who has got, how can I put it? A woman who has got power. Because if you don’t use your power just right…” she whispers. “They go mad and I go did I say something in the wrong tone of voice? In other words, did I have a look on my face that looked determined? Was that a look you didn’t want to look at? It’s fascinating.”

Do you think that women are still put in boxes like if you’re beautiful you’re supposed to be stupid? If you have a PhD you can’t have a manicure? “I think that sort of thing still exists.”

Hawn was never the type of woman who was called a ‘Biatch’ for taking control, for producing a movie, for speaking her mind. She was cleverer than that. She spoke her mind carefully, never angrily. She always appeared sweet. You never thought of her being the one with power. “But I can tell you that I never kept my mouth shut.” But she didn’t ever shout. “No I didn’t and that’s how it worked. I wasn’t fighting anything. But I can tell you I did frustrate a lot of people. I was not happy about the way First Wives Club was handled. The other girls were saying ‘You talk, you talk.’”

That’s interesting. Midler and Keating are both strong, intelligent women. “I’m more confronting. Bette hadn’t done a movie in a long time and Diane is smart as a whip but she’s just not confrontational. I had the mouth so I could articulate what was wrong. Also we were given a script that they guy who was supposed to write it hadn’t written. They had switched to somebody else and I had to say wait a minute. We have script approval. It’s not unusual for movies to have a bumpy start but getting back to whose voice is the loudest, it’s just the voice that says ‘I’m not going to do this.’ That’s when that person becomes powerful.”

Doesn’t that person get mocked and made to feel like a Prima Donna? “Yes and then that person says fine, I’m not angry but when you breach the contract you breach the contract. And they end up having to listen.” But then they’re not in a hurry to employ that person again. “That’s a different story. You could be absolutely blacklisted. I could have been, but I can look at that movie and feel extremely proud that I used my voice.”

And that women are now allowed to be funny. Warily she says, “I think more women are funny, yes…” In the past women weren’t allowed to get the biggest laughs. “That’s right.” Especially not pretty women. “Right.” Because men don’t want to laugh at you if they want to fuck you.” Exactly. A funny woman is not sexy to most men.” But not anymore. That is changing.” But you have been allowed to be funny and beautiful.” Oh thanks honey. The beautiful part is appreciated but I never thought that about myself. And Amy too. Neither of us felt we had that pretty thing. We both grew up doubting ourselves.” This I find textbook shocking. Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin/Shampoo period is unmistakeably gorgeous and the first thing I noticed when I came into the room were those eyes. So much deeper and more soulful in person. “I don’t know about that but I do know there’s no such thing as a sexy clown. But I like the idea that there has been a paving of the way for more women to get out there and produce movies.”

With Hawn the power is all on the inside, the unexpected. She’s always liked to eat healthily, green tea, green juice, almond butter, vitamin Q10, baby aspirin and some weeks she works out every day, but it’s not as superficial as you might think. It’s not about being thin or beautiful anymore. It’s about being in control of her own body and her own mind. “But some days I’ll have wine. I’m allowed. I write my journal when I feel I’m meant to. It’s a wonderful way of resolving something. You write it and you expel it.”

And then the phone rings with its Buddhist chimes. She doesn’t pick it up but the chime itself seems a fitting enough end to our meeting. It’s like the end of a massage when the chimes say you’re calm now, the tension has expelled and that’s what my meeting with Goldie was like – a massage.

When I first arrived at the house I thought this house is too small, too nondescript, too unshowy. It can’t be the house where The Spartacuses live.

Then I spot the mezuzah on the door – Kirk Douglas is a dedicated Jew and then a nurse with gently slippered feet lets me in. I knew I was in the right place. The Douglases are old and need full time care.

The house feels alive when you get in. Cosy but with exquisite art, like the Picasso vase at the entrance bought by Anne Douglas when she worked for the Cannes film festival so so many years ago.

Anne is fully made up, fully coiffed in a blue long sleeved T shirt and navy slacks. Her feet in orthopaedic velcroed shoes. Kirk comes in on his walker. He looks fragile of course, who wouldn’t? He’s a hundred. Or will be on December 9th. But as he stares out at me, his glinty eyes still look to charm. There’s something fierce about him still. He has white hair but he has hair. He speaks with a mighty slur – a remnant of a stroke in 1996. It’s difficult to get used to understanding it but not impossible. He was pretty depressed about being rendered speechless. Not much an actor can do without speech unless silent movies are making a comeback he would joke. Except it wasn’t a joke. He contemplated suicide but knew it was too selfish an act and Kirk Douglas, born Issur Danielovich, is a survivor. He knows how to pick himself up. He is the last living legend, the last screen hero of the golden years. The action hero that started it all. He was a Viking and he was Spartacus. He did his own stunts and had a personal trainer well into his nineties and all this is in him still. He’s learnt to communicate in a different way. He looks at me with a frisking my soul kind of look. “I bet you’ve never interviewed a hundred year old before,” he challenges.

At the start of our meeting he looks to Anne for support, but then he seems feel who I am with his eyes. If I don’t understand the words he’s saying, he’ll intuit it and communicate by sheer telepathy. It’s hard to explain this. I got a full and absolute sense of the man because he didn’t try to hide everything. Or if he did try to avoid questions like how many lovers did his wife not know about? He’ll shrug and just laugh and jokes, ‘I don’t understand the question.’ He tells me how glad he is to see me, a little bit of London in LA. “I haven’t been able to travel to London for the last four or five years. I have been…” and he tries to finish the sentence and just shrugs. ‘I’ve been here.’

Is he thinking about his hundredth birthday plans? “Well I found out when you reach a hundred they forget about you. I think a hundred is a very lonely age because all my friends are gone, all the one from the movies.” Maybe he has new friends I say cheerily, because who couldn’t be sad that Burt Lancaster and Lana Turner and Lauren Bacall didn’t make it to celebrate with him. He’s not suddenly thinking about death. He’s always thought about death. He says, “If you’re Marilyn, you will always be remembered as 36 but if you’re old….I don’t know. I think he will always be remembered for his bare chested bravery, for his virility, for his rogueish handsomeness.

Surely he must have some friends coming to the party? “I have my wife. She is equated to about five friends.” He looks at Anne and Anne raises her eyebrows. He can still joke. The jokes are all based on mocking himself.

He was born in 1916, the only boy with five sisters. His mother told him he was born in a golden box delivered by angels and for many years he believed that – he must have always felt he was special? He shrugs. “Yes. I had six sisters and only one of them now lives. I was brought up more by my mother because my father was busy drinking in the saloons.” His father Herschel was a ragman, which means he had a cart that pulled rags door to door, bought and sold in the poor neighbourhood of Amsterdam, New York. His parents had emigrated from Russia. They were illiterate and they were Jews. There wasn’t great opportunities for them in this time of great prejudice. The ragman sold his rags and spent his money in the bars. He was a big strong man who knew peasant ways, like how to insulate the house for winter with horse dung but not how to be an emotional communicator. He was distant and discouraging even though the young Issur/Kirk wanted to please him, he rarely did. He admired him because he was his father, yet he was absent both physically and emotionally.

How did that affect Kirk as a fatherto his four sons Joel, Michael, Peter, Eric? He nods sagely. “Of course a hundred years and I think about my father a lot and I realise that my best friends were always women, maybe because my mother was wonderful.” By this I interpret he wanted to be a very different father to the one he endured. “We were poor. We were living in a terrible house. We had nearly nothing and if my mother saw a hobo they would come to the house, knock on the door and while we didn’t have much food, my mother always saved something for them so yes, I was closer to my mother. I called my company Bryna after my mother.” And because of her he always found it easier to become closer to women? In touch with his feminine side? “Yes,” he beams. Even now, slumped in his chair, he’s tough. The least likely man to be in touch with his feminine side, yet somehow he is. “My mother couldn’t speak English when she first came from Russia. I remember taking her to New York City in a big limousine for a premiere. I said Ma, you see, America is a wonderful land.” Did it make her happy to be in the limo with you? He says, “She never expressed it but I know she was.” Neither of his parents were good at expressing love, were they? “Well, it was so difficult to live.”

For many years Kirk blamed himself for his youngest son Eric’s lonely death from a drugs overdose at 45. Eric was always the crazy one. Even as a child he had anger issues. He was a talented actor and in later years a stand-up comedian. I saw his act at the Edinburgh festival. It was based on jokes about his father and his more famous brother Michael. Kirk for years agonised over it and wondered if it was because he wasn’t there enough or because he thought he was too big an act to follow. Eric had been addicted to drugs and his parents had paid for many rehabs and sober buddies. They tried to get him involved in forming a facility to help others. Eric was too far gone for that.

I remember interviewing him after his show in Edinburgh attended by about 25 people. Glad of the attention he followed me back to my hotel and shouted outside the window all night for me to come out. I didn’t. A year later he was dead. Eric Douglas was 46 when he was found in his New York apartment dead for an overdose. He had gone into rehab a month before with renewed efforts at sobriety

Kirk and Anne used to visit his grave twice a week. They did that for as long as they could easily walk.

Anne who is strong and clever and self-controlled was inconsolable. So many other dramatic events informed her life.

She was born in Germany around 1930. She doesn’t give her exact age. As a little girl she was extremely close to her father. “My parents were not too great together. My mother was a beautiful women and we always had a governess. My mother was away a lot. She got the best dresses, the best cars. We had a big silk manufacturing place and my father had a sales lady there that he wanted me to become friends with, so we formed a close friendship. My parents divorced. I had an extremely close relationship with my father. We told each other everything. At night before I went to bed I would write to him in a little blue book and he would write the reply. One day he said, ‘I’m going on a short business trip.’ I trusted him and relied on him. When he came back I ran downstairs to meet him and he was with my friend the sales agent and he said ‘This is your new mother.’ I cried my eyes out. He betrayed me. I started work very young and went to live in Berlin where my mother was. She continued her deluxe life and I had a little divan in her dressing room and got a job in a doctor’s office.” Then she went to work in Belgium and ended up in Paris Hitler had invaded.

“I was working by putting German subtitles on French movies because I spoke three languages. It was very tedious. It looked like I was writing in code and my maid gave my translation sheet to the Nazis so at 5am they picked me up and arrested me. It was difficult to explain to them what I was doing but eventually they let me go.” She must have been terrified. “That was an understatement. I was brought up during the regime of a dictator and a persecutor and now I feel that years later in America, Donald Trump is a dictator and it scares me. People should have lived in Germany where they thought that Hitler was OK. They said, oh he wasn’t too bad. They thought he wasn’t really doing what he was doing. People thought that Hitler was a buffoon and people should realise that Donald Trump is a dictator! It scares me. She speaks with certainty and passion. At whatever age she is, you can tell she was never anybody’s fool. The couple look at each other throughout, checking.

“I worked in the film industry when the war was over and I was sent everywhere because of my language skills. I was asked to do public relations for American films that were being made in Paris.” Kirk chimes, “And that’s where I come into the story.” Kirk grins and his eyes flash. It’s almost as if they’re flirting with each other. Anne continues, “I was asked by a director to work on An Act of Love but I told him no because I had just finished working on Moulin Rouge and had been invited to take the leading lady to Hollywood.” When she came back they still wanted her to work on the movie – a Kirk Douglas movie. “I went to the studio and a friend of mine who was working on set said, ‘I will take you into the lion’s den.’ And that was it.” I look at Kirk. So…he was the lion? He smiles rather sweetly, not even nostalgically because he still thinks he is a lion.

Was Anne a little wary of the lion? She chuckles. “Not at all. He asked me if could do some secretarial work for him and I said no but I’ll find somebody for you.”

Kirk adds, “This beautiful girl was in the lion’s den. I tried to get her to work for me and I was amazed when she said NO. I escorted her to her car and asked her to have dinner with me at Tour d’Argent – the fanciest restaurant in Paris and she said she was going home to make scrambled eggs.” Kirk was obsessed with what he couldn’t have? “Yes.” This wasn’t part of Anne’s massive game play. She just was too sensible, too vulnerable to throw herself in the ring with what was then the world’s biggest movie star. But scrambled eggs I ask her? “Sure. I was exhausted. I’d just come back from LA to Paris and in those days it was propeller planes. You stopped everywhere. It took two days so I said no thank you I have to go to bed.” This must have made her incredibly exciting to this lion here. “Yes,” says Kirk very definitely. But hang on, Kirk, wasn’t he engaged to another women called Pier Angeli? “Well, yes.” And wasn’t she about twelve and he had to take her on dates with her mother? “No. you are exaggerating. She was 18 when we met. 21 when we were engaged.

Meanwhile Angeli was touring the world, with or without her mother and being extremely elusive and Anne was in Paris, as was Kirk. Eventually they went on a date at the circus, a very famous circus I’m assured. Kirk said, “I was surprised when she said yes.” Anne finishes the story. “Everybody was dressed up and it was very elegant and then he appeared on the show with a pooper scooper for the elephant in a tuxedo.” Kirk beams with recollection of the perfect night. “Everybody thought I was very funny but I made her laugh and then we became good friends that night.” How good friends? “Well…” he gestures and for a minute I think is he hamming it up. Anne corrects. “We kissed that night and that was a little more than a friendly kiss and that’s how it started and every so often when we got in the most passionate way he reminded me that he really was engaged to Pier. It was a secret engagement. It hadn’t been announced. I worked on the movie in France and then I was hired for his next picture in Italy called Ulysses, produced by Carlo Ponti.”

He tells me that every night they were filming he would drive up to see Anne. But what about his fiancée? He talks about a day where he and Anne had a boat and they went on a romantic little pleasure trip up the coast, where they thought they were hidden in a private harbour, but somehow Pier found out. “I could never find her when I wanted to but she always knew where I was,” he says, Anne looks irritated to this day. “She was a little devil. She was devious.” Kirk, was he really in love with her? “I was young.. she was a fantasy.” Anne continues. “He and I were very close and the last straw was I was driving him to the airport in my little Renault. He was going to go home to the US to finish 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and at the airport a stewardess comes to the car and says to Kirk, ‘Miss Pier Angeli is waiting for you on the plane.’ That did it. I broke up with him and I told him I’d never see him again. I went to a friend’s apartment in Nice and I told my maid not to tell Mr Douglas where I am. I am gone.”

So how did this make Kirk feel? “I now had my girlfriend Pier without her mother, on her own. This was New Year’s Eve and we were walking in a garden on a river and I was thinking of Anne.” So now he had Angeli he was bored? “Yes, maybe but she seemed to know. She took off the ring I gave her and threw it at me so next morning I used a lot of charm and made Anne’s maid tell me where she was. And I got my passport and went right to her.” Anne continues, “I had told him this was it but then he bribed my maid. I told him I didn’t want to see him again. I didn’t want to start it up again. And somehow he got me to go ski-ing with him in Switzerland. I went to Paris and he went back to America and asked if I would come and visit for two weeks. I told everybody in Paris, either he’s going to marry me or I come back for good. We had a wonderful time and then he said to me, ‘my ex-wife and children are coming in ten days.’ I said don’t worry I will have left. And he said, ‘No. don’t leave.’

Then one day he came home a little bit late, went down on his knees and asked me to marry him and tried to give me Pier Angelis’ ring.” She raises her eyebrows and I ask him what was he thinking? “That’s nothing compared to what she did to me when we were in Paris and she made a birthday party….” Anne finishes the story because she’s proud of it. “Every girl, including the one from the night before when he said he was seeing rushes – he never sees rushes – was invited to that party. Every woman that he’d had an affair with in Paris that I knew of, and that line was very long already and I’m sure I missed a few, was there to greet him. And I was standing at the end and he turned to me and said, “You bitch.” We all laugh.

And you realise Anne’s humour, fighting spirit and ability to brush things off, just like she brushed off a Nazi interrogation, made her probably the only woman that was strong enough for him. They went to Vegas to get married.

Anne recalls, “Because I didn’t know the word lawful I said I would take him to be my ‘awful’ wedded husband. As soon as we were married, Frank Sinatra was in one room performing, Mickey Rooney was in another. We were in a big suite in the Sahara hotel but we went from one place to another. I said to Kirk come on now to bed. He said, ‘we’ve been sleeping together for a year, tonight we are gambling.’”

Kirk and Anne refer to Kirk’s first wife Diana … the woman he married on leave from the Navy and Michael and Joel’s mother as ‘our ex-wife.’ Anne says, “We became instant friends and we never called her by her name – always our ex-wife. The first independent movie Kirk made was The Indian Fighter. He asked, ‘Do you mind if my ex-wife is in the movie?’ I said of course not.” Kirk says, “The kids have to come and live with you and the nanny as well. Is that OK? So the kids moved in while me and the ex-wife made the movie.” Anne was never jealous? “No, well not of her. If I would get jealous it would have become a ridiculous habit. I said to him if it happens, you tell me. If I hear it from other people it hurts me deeply. If you tell me what you’re up to I can get by with it. Maybe I missed a few hundred. I don’t know.”

Kirk, how many affairs did he confess to? “Oh I don’t know,” he says, suddenly put on the spot. “I’m not very good at keeping secrets.” Anne reminds me, “One year he asked me would I like a surprise birthday party? If I have a bottom line it is to say that we were fantastic lovers and better friends. That is what gives us serenity and a great attachment. And now we are, I suppose it’s corny to say, but now we are one.”

They look at each other, their eyes both lock, it’s a sly exchange rather than an adoring one. She catches me observing that. “It has been that way for a long time.”

Why did she convert to Judaism after fifty years of marriage? So Kirk could say, ‘I finally married a nice Jewish girl?’ She smiles. “I told the Rabbi I would like to convert and he said you don’t have to and I said I do for my husband.” The Rabbi comes every week and he and Kirk read scriptures, discuss the Torah and life. “So I did it. I did the Mikvah. Do you know what that is?” It means you have to submerge yourself in water, symbolic of a total cleanse. “Yes all the way in. my hair got wet. I was upset about that. The Rabbi said ‘invite whoever you want,” and I said sure. I’ll invite all my friends and they’ll see me with no polish no make-up, my hair hanging down. No thank you but then I ran to the hairdresser and became that nice Jewish girl.”

The one that Kirk always wanted? “Well, not really. Well…” he says coyly.

Anne Douglas is perfectly coiffed. Full on eye make-up, nails, everything and that’s just for sitting in the house. The Mikvah must have been quite a trauma. Kirk was Barmitzvahed twice. Once when he was 13 and he had to give all his Barmitzvah money to his father and the second time when he was 83. “I never brought my kids up Jewish. Both my wives were not Jewish but Michael’s children Dylan and Carys were interested in it. When Dylan got to be 11 he wanted a Barmitzvah. He said ‘I want to be Jewish.’ Michael also always wanted to be accepted as a Jew, even though his mother wasn’t Jewish. Eric was Barmitzvahed and Peter and Peter’s children. It’s good. They came to it by themselves. Am I a good Jew? I don’t go to the Synagogue but the Rabbi is a friend and he comes every week.” Anne says, “And Kirk takes his confession.”

Kirk, for the first time not joking says, “Let’s not talk any more about religion because nobody really knows. I’m a hundred years old and I don’t think I’ll be going to heaven.” Anne says, “Yes you will be going there. I will send you there and wherever else you want to go.”

They have written a book together, Kirk and Anne, the letters. Letters from when they first met. Letters when Anne was at home looking after the children and Kirk was on location after location. Kirk says, “I’ve written eleven books. I’m always talking about myself. I’ve never given credit to my wife. Why don’t we do a book together?” Anne continues, “Unbeknownst to me I’d kept all the letters. I found them among letters from famous people like Henry Kissinger.” Douglas and Kissinger were friends and he was close to several presidents.

While they were separated on different continents they wrote to one another all the time. It’s interesting to see how he feels. He was so excited when he got the financing for Vikings but Tony Curtis wanted to be in it and take the role that Kirk had earmarked for himself, so he and Anne worked out the decision through letters. Anne encouraging, “give it to Curtis. It will be good for box office.” And in another letter Laurence Olivier said that he wanted to play Spartacus, which obviously didn’t happen.

I wonder if all this swooping up of memories is him preparing to die. What does he think happens after you die? “What do I think of what?” He doesn’t want to talk about it now but he’s written another book, Let’s Face It (he was 90 insert).

Steven Spielberg calls him dad. Why is that? “His mother had a restaurant, the Milky Way and I used to go there for lunch. His mother was so good. I got to know him and he became like a kid to me. I admire him. He’s a great guy and the only billionaire that I like. I won’t hold his money against him.”

My pedicurist went to their house a few years ago and she told me in the bathroom was a framed dollar bill. It was the first dollar he ever made and he framed it so he could always know what it was like to not have any money, to know that he made it on his own. A little touchstone.

He held out for Dalton Trumbo to write the script of Spartacus even though at the time he was blacklisted. Douglas was the catalyst that ended the cruel blacklisting in the McCarthy era. It was the era of the Cold War and anyone in the film industry who was suspected rightly or wrongly of being a communist was blacklisted.

Kirk bought the last ever Trumbo script Montezuma “and Steven bought it from me. I doubt it will come soon because it’s a huge project.” There’s a tangible sadness. Obviously Douglas would have liked to see the movie made and jokes, “will we get any Mexicans in it or will they all be back in Mexico if Trump gets in?” Kirk changes the subject to Michael. Michael is a good son. I never paid attention to him when he was growing up. I said Michael I want you to be a doctor or a lawyer and suddenly he got this part in a play. I told him Michael you were terrible.”

Michael Doulas has referred to this often. It must have hurt him. “No,” says Kirk, “because two months later I went to see him in another play and he was wonderful. I said Michael you were really good and he’s been really good in everything he’s done.” Kirk bought XXXX, a Broadway Play for Michael and he also bought One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for Michael, even though Jack Nicholson ended up taking the role. Kirk and Michael had a constant banter about being rivals. They can do that because they’re very close. It’s been written that one close up of Kirk Douglas’s face in Spartacus is more powerful than the whole of Lawrence Olivier’s acting career. That’s a very tough act to follow. You see him talking about Michael with pride and with love, something which his own father was never able to do about him. You feel glad that he was able to survive his past and not repeat it.

“You know when I got sick, the thing that hurt me was I couldn’t go to England. Burt Lancaster and I did the Palladium, you know. We were a big hit.” And then he starts singing. And the singing is really not bad, in fact he’s singing more in tune than me as we both attempt ‘maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner that I love London town.” It’s sweet. We laugh and he says, “I’m glad you brought London to me.”

Kirk Douglas is the last remaining star of the golden age and seeing him, this hundred year old man who has struggles with his knees, with hearing, seeing, talking, you see that spirit, a spirit that wants to not only survive not only conquer but charm. If his father had loved him maybe he wouldn’t have needed the world to love him so much and he wouldn’t have been as good at it. In a couple of hours he has totally charmed me, a man who can barely speak has utterly seduced me and that’s why he is a star.

You hear that Harrison Ford is not an easy man to be in a room with. Combative as an interviewee, defensive as a person, you read that he is pernickety, challenging, brusque, that he interrogates every question. He doesn’t want to give anything away. He holds a great weight inside of himself. That is part of his charisma.

I am in the beachy luxury of the old Spanish style hotel Casa del Mar in Santa Monica, chosen no doubt because he lives nearby, to be in a room with him. It’s a shock. He’s more sexy in the flesh. His face more rugged and real. He smiles a crooked but welcoming smile. His black shirt skims a taut stomach. No paunchiness, lots of working out. Age will not wither him. His hair is thick and in a ruffled crop. I tell him how much better he looks than the night before when I saw him on TV at the Academy Awards.

“Less well dressed,” he offers in his low rasping almost gravel whisper. More handsome, better hair. “What was wrong with my hair last night?” he says bringing out Mr Defensive. “It’s the same. It’s freshly washed. Nothing different.” He’s so easily offended by a compliment. Suspicious of everything already, but in a charming way. There’s an eruption of uneasiness and gentleness at the same time. Something taut and controlled as well as something wild. That’s often what he brings to his heroic roles.

He’s most known as being the hero. That’s what he’s good at, mixing ordinariness, even haplessness, with luck and strength that comes out of nowhere. The winner against all odds. He’s not showy or glossy. He doesn’t package or sell himself. He once said empathy was not a talent but a disposition. All of the above may have combined to make him one of the best paid heroes of all time. His combined films have grossed over $1 billion and he is the only actor to have made over $100 million for each decade that he’s worked. And here he is, about to reprise his most famous hero, indefatigable archeologist Indiana Jones, the role that first moved him to the super league of actors in 1981. The trilogy has been one of the biggest grossing box office takes of all time.

He’s good at being a hero. He does it so effortlessly with such laconic restraint, better at being a hero or a president than a romancer. But of course he’s done all of those things. What’s it like for him to be reviving the devil in his eyes role of Indiana Jones, 27 years after his first raid. The man who was voted sexiest alive as a thirtysomething surely finds different challenges as a sixtysomething? He is now 65.

He looks at me with yellow grey eyes. They fix a stare, reminding me of the stare he fixed on Kelly McGillis in Witness where she played an Amish woman. He stared at her knowing she wasn’t supposed to be stared at and managed to make it overtly sexy. “I like your hair too,” he says, although you see the circles of his mind rhythmically turning as he’s thinking how to correctly answer how time passes yet a hero remains the same. You see him measuring the rhythm of his sentence in his head before he says it.

His staring makes me feel the silence with the same question, slightly different. Does he feel a different kind of hero? Does he feel different about doing all the intense physical stuff?

“No,” he says. “It was fun. I was never so interested in the heroic part of it. This guy is an extraordinary character with an active imagination that’s just involved in a chain of events where some elements twist into something else…” He seems to like the stress, the haplessness. Indiana Jones, like Harrison Ford, doesn’t like to take credit or blame. He likes to just do the job.

“We didn’t shoot it like a Matrix style where if you hit somebody they end up in this big space and you didn’t feel the hurt, you don’t feel the fear. I feel you very quickly lose emotional connection with the character if it’s like that. We are more old school. I feel as fit as I did 20 years ago. They have figured out new things in safety so myself and the stunt man can do more. For instance when you see a car and a bus converging and we are in the middle on a motorcycle we are on a thin wire with a special harness…” He goes on, and on. He worked with the stunt men not they instead of him.

Do you have a thrill of doing those things? “No,” he says, pause, “It’s just fun. There’s not a lot of CGI, it’s mostly done with real physicality, real sets, some things put to scale.”

You ride motorbikes anyway, don’t you? “Yes,” he says, distracted, not wanting to talk about his own macho moments. Or maybe just his own moments. “But I don’t drag through the stuff he does. The fun is figuring out how to do it safely and survivable, the things that are outside your normal range of experience.”

He uses the phrase a few times, “Outside of your experience” as if for him that’s the excitement of the journey, to be outside of himself, a release. You ask why, when he so obviously loves his Indiana Jones persona and to make these movies, did it take so long? The last film was 19 years ago. “We started talking about it 15 years ago and over that period of time three scripts have been produced. It took the three of us, George (Lucas), Steven (Spielberg) and I to commit to course and none of us was fully satisfied with what was produced and then we were all doing different things.”

He shrugs as if there was no tension in that disagreement, as if it’s perfectly normal to reprise a role two decades apart. Over the years there have been other heroes and villains. Most successfully, Air Force One, The Fugitive, Patriot Games. Most critically acclaimed Bladerunner. He can do comedy as long as he’s not being too funny; Working Girl. There was the uncomfortable romcom Six Days Seven Nights with Anne Heche and the miscast Sabrina. And the super scary What Lies Beneath – taut sex scenes with Michelle Pfeiffer.

He is never raunchy. Always intrepid but never with a sense of entitlement. He usually does decency better than devious, but he can manage that too. It has been said that it’s his ordinariness that is so winning. But there’s far too much tangible conflict going on inside him for me to buy into that.

He’s never made an independent movie. He once said, “I simply have no particular yearning to do the same work for less money.” He once referred to his audiences as “my customers”. He grew up in the nondescript suburb of Des Plaines, Chicago. He left with his new wife when he was 22 to come to Hollywood. He had a small contract as an actor which he had to supplement with other work, mostly as a carpenter. After struggle came super money and the expectation that now Indiana Jones IV will be the biggest money maker of the year. Bringing all the players back together was obviously a big deal. He is resolute not to be ruffled by that or explain the ways in which they all couldn’t agree. Or perhaps he just wants to enjoy the moment of being back on the ride, escaping disaster, being outside of his experience.

He seems to study how not to even move an eyebrow when he tells me about a stunt that almost went wrong, that involved driving a military vehicle through a wall that was rigged with explosives. “It was supposed to look like the car was causing the wall to fly through the air and that I was driving through it, but it came just a millisecond before I went through… And I looked down and right next to me on the seat there’s this big-assed box of explosives that had survived. If it had gone off it would have caused a stitchable.” He uses the term stitchables as in cut as shorthand as if he’s old friends with stitchables.

“I didn’t get hurt on this one at all. I’ve got war wounds but they are all athletic or stupid, not because of a heroic willingness to endure pain or take risks.”

His most defining scar is across his chin, a great gash which has never

been homogenised by any cosmetic surgeon. It came from driving into a telegraph pole which somehow makes it more real, a different kind of heroic. “It was stupid. I was on my way to work in the knick knack and oil painting department of Bullocks department store. I was on this twisty Laurel Canyon road when I realised I had my seat belt off. It was an old Volvo coupe. The seat belt was hung on a peg over your shoulder. As I was fumbling to get it off the peg I ran off the road, hit a kerb, went up on two wheels and crashed into a telephone pole. I got this from the steering wheel on my way through the windshield. That was not heroic, it was stupid. Heroes are people who rush into burning buildings, who throw themselves on a grenade, who save starving people, who selflessly devote themselves to others.”

He looks at me closing his mouth to a full pout as if to stress that’s not him. He’s not up to that job. You sense that this is a man who doesn’t want to disappoint. In fact his life has been propelled by a dread of that. Don’t build me up and I can’t let you down. ” I’ve never had lofty goals – I just do the best job I can..” he once said.

There’s an insecurity about him that pulls you in, that translates on screen to vulnerability inside toughness, like a thread that runs through his work; daredevil hero, conflicted president, brain damaged lawyer, frantic husband or thwarted lover. He doesn’t like to be seen to try too hard. His sentences and movements are all purposeful, sparse. There is a heaviness around him that may come over on screen as strength and solidity, but as he rocks awkwardly in his chair you wonder if it’s not damage. He’s sitting so far forward I can see the label inside his black shirt, Theory. Not middle aged Brooks Brothers or pretentious Prada, but middle youth Theory.

He seems to feel me thinking about his vulnerability. “If the person you play behaves heroically they also have to humility and vulnerability and be deep enough in the shit of it all to have to save themselves. That’s a character I prefer to play, a guy who’s in over his head, who survives because of his tenacity, or his wit, or his dumb luck. That’s more interesting.”

Tenacity is interesting. “I think it is.” Is that him? Is that how he is? He smiles a long slow smile. He said the word tenacity with a strange kind of pride, wilfully dismissing any other of his talents. “I certainly have tenacity and in enough force to measure out through not just the last 15 or so years but the apprenticeship before I made enough money before I was able to say I was a full-time actor.” I don’t know why he said 15 years when he’s been a full-time actor for 30, but he’s just lost track of time.

It was a long time before he could say he was a full-time actor. He approached it with hands-on hard work, no over intellectualised method acting. He’s not the kind of actor who acts from the head or does it as therapy. It’s a different set of instincts. More from the body and heart. He has been dismissive of acting as therapy in the past, the idea that playing someone else gives you the chance of getting some emotional exercise. “I am not an unbridled fan of therapy,” he once said. Of course he’s not because he doesn’t like to explain himself. He’s all about the withholding. He’s cancerian. Hard on the outside, delicate flesh on the in, but choosing carefully who he might want to know that. The last person he would choose would be himself. Nonetheless he is emotionally present, even if he doesn’t want you to think he is. He never drifts off. He is very much on, alert, astute, assessing every second. Extremely driven at all times, even if he’s not sure where he’s going.

His first marriage was perhaps the casualty of this drive, or perhaps he was just too young. He married Mary Marquadt in 1964, a cheerleader he met in high school. He had dropped out of the University of Wisconsin in favour of pursuing the Hollywood dream, or at least his version of it, which seemed to be rather a domestic one. They had two children to support, Ben, now a renowned Los Angeleno chef, 40, and Willard, 37. After working at Bullocks he became a carpenter, a good carpenter who like a Hollywood fairytale was rediscovered as an actor when he was cabinet making for George Lucas. He put him first in American Graffiti then Star Wars, and that was the start of the accidental hero trajectory, the one that fits in so well on screen and so uncomfortably off.

There are many interviews in the past where he has said the biggest regret was the failure of his first marriage. But that was before the second one had failed also. He has commented, “Sometimes I think I have been a better actor than husband or father. I had to leave my family behind in order to make money for us to eat.” Mary Marquadt now suffers from MS and doesn’t believe that he was a bad husband. In a recent interview she talked about how Ford still more than provides for her financially. “Harrison has been a true friend and a great love. He has stood by me quietly asking for nothing in return through my darkest days.”

It is impossible to imagine that Ford was not conflicted if not tortured when both marriages fell apart. He met his second wife, ET screenwriter Melissa Mathison when she was an executive assistant on Apocalypse Now in 1979. They were married for 17 years. They have a son Malcolm, 21, and daughter, Georgia, 16. Much of the marriage was spent in Jackson, Wyoming. He rebuilt woodland and redirected trout streams. They watched eagles. He was labelled reclusive and quiet family man. He was out of the public eye and enjoyed that. The marriage floundered. There was a separation, a brief reunion and a divorce. The disruption of it must have been hard for him as this is a man who also talked about not liking his furniture to be moved even a few inches. He depends on what is solid.

Colin Farrell said recently if he wasn’t an actor he’d be a carpenter because he likes making things. Is there a link between building a character and an apprenticeship in carpentry? His eyes sparkle, he moves from a nervous hunched position in his chair to a welcoming open one. He likes this question. “I think so. I think it’s a way to organise your thinking around something, making something. It is gratifying to take a piece of lumber and make it into something else, knowing that you had this idea and made this idea manifest. It’s the same thing with acting, you take these disparate bits and put them together and make this character. It’s purpose built to serve the story, just like you build a piece of furniture for utility. It’s a practical mindset that many actors have, not all. But there’s a strain that runs all the way down from me to Olivier who had this similar sense. We all have to find our own way but it’s interesting when you discover that others have the same idea of it as a craft rather than some strange artistic process that is not available to any but the most gifted of us. It’s a hard slug sometimes. You have to know what you’re doing and why you are doing it and that you are in service to an idea, a conversation between you and the audience. It’s always about the story,” he says loving the idea that he is lost in something bigger than himself.

Has he ever ever not been able to find a way in, had actors block? “No. It’s always been fun for me. It used to be more difficult because I had less of a sense of how to work with people to gain the kind of confidence and understanding that allows you to help them.” In other words being an actor taught him how to be.

“You have to learn about people to make it work.” Were you naturally good with people growing up I say, guessing that he was cripplingly shy, awkward and self-contained. “No,” he says looking at me with the grey yellow staring eyes again, sometimes so wounded, sometimes so combative. He knows that I must have read he was bullied at school. That boys took him up to the top of the hill, beat him up, then rolled him down.

“I wasn’t very sociable. In fact one of the things that I found in acting was something I could do with people because I didn’t like competitive sports, teams, so there was nothing…” the voice trails. Does he mean acting was a way of dealing with people but not actually being yourself, but a self you could make available to other people. “Yeh, that’s part of it as well. But also something slightly different. I discovered I could scare the bejesus out of people, but my own knees were knocking. I couldn’t control my own emotions even when I was pretending, so it was a matter of self-discipline, doing something that at times scared me and then I found I actually loved working. I loved stories and this is my way to being part of a group of storytellers. I felt the power of the story, the power of literature, identifying elemental themes, the things that concern us all, then disguising it in a revelation of plot and characters, and then I thought, shit, this is it, this is the stuff of life, give me a piece of this,” he says beaming, twinkling, theatrical even, but affecting.

“I was working with a group of people and it was the first time I found a sense of community in my life, in a culture that I was part of.” His hands lay open on his jeans. His soul now seems open. That element of fear that he talks about and overcoming it, learning from it, is that what still drives him? “No.” He is comfortable in his pause. What is he afraid of tackling? “Nothing really. I enjoy the performing up until the point they ask me to sing,” he laughs. “I’m not interested in being scared any more. When you get scared you close up and it’s all about opening up,” he says as if I should know, opening up is what’s been hardest and scariest for him as opposed to knowing how to protect himself.

What about the notion that if you are afraid of something you should do it anyway, it’s good for you? “I don’t identify with those things,” he says sternly. He has a way of shrinking you instantly, making you feel bad for talking to him in T-shirt slogan psychology. He corrects, “I would fear going to war but I don’t have any reason for doing that. I would fear going into a fire, and I’m not going to do that.”

The silence becomes awkward again, filled with unasked questions and a rearranging of barriers. He wobbles about in his chair. It makes a noise – clack, clack, clack. His black shirt skims his body in an interesting way showing off his shape which is lithe and strong. He looks good not just for 65, but just good. He holds back his emotions in such an obvious way; anger, pain, self righteousness, and fear of being judged are all set out there in front of us. Now he is sitting in a squashed up position doing something strange and tense with his arm, almost pushing himself back on it. His eyes dart the room and then back to me. He’s looking at me to see what I’m looking at, perhaps testing if I am going to look away first. I don’t. He softens. “I’m not afraid of flying for instance because I’ve learned to fly and I was taught properly in stages. People think that my attraction to it might be for the thrill or I might be into things like that for the speed or the thrill. I’m not so crazy about that. What I’m interested in is understanding what the risks are, mitigating them by having the required skills, practising those skills, planning the event and knowing where the danger is.” Pretty much his reasoning for dangerous acting, working with the stuntman, not CGI.

Does he feel afraid when other people are flying the plane? “Oh,” he smiles, “I far prefer to fly myself. I’m not afraid but I’m a do it yourself kind of guy.” He is a cocktail of insecurity and fearlessness. You imagine that he was reared with emotional low maintenance. That must have taken its toll and left gaps that will go forever unnurtured. Does he still have his ranch? I imagined him there tromping through the woods, through the mountains in conversation with only himself.

“I have what they refer to as a ranch. I have a piece of land in Jackson, Wyoming, that is largely forest rather than cleared for pasture. It’s full of wildlife and streams and the like. It’s on the Snake River and it’s much the same as it was 150 years ago,” he says dreamily. “It’s in the mountains and it’s…” His voice stops. Do you spend much time there? “I don’t now because I have a seven year old in first grade, so we are nailed to the school schedule and she is doing a series in television that is very successful, so she has to be here.”

The she is Calista Flockhart, his girlfriend since meeting at the 2002 Golden Globe Awards. He had never seen an episode of Ally McBeal. The neurotic lawyer and her pin thinness had made her extremely famous. Much was made of the fact she was 22 years younger, although she looks more womanly now. They have been together six years and though the barbs may have softened against them, you feel that they’ll forever be scratching in his head. People didn’t seem to accept them as a couple. It wasn’t what they would have imagined, but a few years prior to Calista, people were shocked to find Ford drinking tequila slammers, he was pictured in nightclubs or strip joints and once was even said to have a woman’s bra on his head. Perhaps it was because people had him down as boringly trustworthy, a grafter, not a player.

Wasn’t that the real time of terror? Wasn’t it frightening to change his life by stepping into a new relationship? “No. It’s exciting exploring new relationships. I had been out of the relationship business for a couple of years when we met, except for relationships with my kids that is. I hadn’t had a serious relationship…” There’s a pause as if he might be thinking of a different way to put that. “As an actor I’ve always taken risks. I open myself up to possibilities.” Those possibilities came after a long phase of being out on the town. Suddenly here he was in public, a man who had always loved anonymity. There were reports of flings with Minnie Driver and Lara Flynn Boyle, who inspired the phrase ‘lollypop lady’ because her head was too big for her tiny body. He inherited her from Jack Nicholson and seemed to be enjoying releasing his inner Jack on the world. Isn’t that the time that people refer to as his mid-life crisis I ask.

“I don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. I went out more since there was no reason to stay at home. Not a big deal. I think they were looking for some new development to introduce into the Harrison Ford story, so they went for that and the appearance of an earring was enough for them to generate the whole mid-life crisis thing.” Yes, indeed reams were written about the small and black glittering thing that still sits in his ear.

He could have got a tattoo or something like that? “No I couldn’t because then I wouldn’t be able to be buried in the Jewish cemetery.” But he is not Jewish. “I’m half Jewish. My mother. And that’s the half that makes you Jewish. But I don’t want a tattoo anyway. The earring came after I had lunch with a couple of buddies – Jimmy Buffet, the singer, and Ed Bradley, the guy from 60 Minutes. Both had earrings, pirates the both of them.” he likes that word pirate. He smiles conspiratorially as he says it. “I walked away from lunch saying you know what, I’m going to get my ears pierced, just to piss people off. And I went down to the first jewellery store on Madison Avenue that offered to punch a hole in your ear for the price of an earring and suddenly I had one.” I admire its glitteringness. “It doesn’t much matter to me, but I liked it a little bit that people say wait a second, what’s going on. Although I don’t go out of my way to get people to comment,” he says, and stops, realising he has contradicted himself saying he loves attention, he hates it. He loves the woods, he likes the parties. He particularly liked the idea that such a tiny thing could orchestrate huge hysteria.

I tell him I like the idea that someone who embraces a riven masculinity could introduce something to his persona that’s a little feminine and a little camp. He looks uncomfortable, pauses, laughs, first of all nervously, and then wickedly as he says. “I think I was introducing the naughty.” And here we see what is perhaps the most natural Harrison Ford, the playful. Who would Indiana Jones be if he were not playful. He continues, “Those two buggers were genuine pirates. They were brilliant. Ed had to wear a suit to work and he had this big assed earring and you weren’t supposed to do that if you were on 60 Minutes. That’s what I liked. It was a little tiny case of being a rebel.” Was that new for him to rebel? “Oh no. I think I always had the rebel, I just didn’t have the earring.”

If you had a superpower what would it be? “I would love to be invisible.” Yeh, of course you would. We laugh. “Yeh, that’s problematic, isn’t it.” You wonder about the premier action hero, one of the biggest grossing actors of all time and his desire to be invisible. I’m sure the real Ford has been concealed, buried, mutated within Indiana Jones and all the others – all the brave ones. Perhaps that’s where he went to be invisible. “Perhaps,” he says. By now though he’s not looking tortured or stiff. He’s funny and easy to be in the room with. “Don’t you think it would be great to have that super power? I wouldn’t use it just to sneak into changing rooms. I would be able to observe human nature without being observed.” Would he sneak into changing rooms as well? He laughs. “I don’t know if my earring would be invisible.” We imagine the little dot swooping around the changing room and women trying to swat him like a fly. “I’d like to fly too. Everyone has flying dreams. They are the most spectacular. Have you seen those guys who wear squirrel suits. It’s a suit that has a web here,” he points to under his arms and between his legs. “They jump off mountains. I would never do that. I like having engines.”

The conversation has wound itself back to engines and action and I turn it back into something more interior. When he’s in a relationship does he like to observe but not really known himself, I ask? “It looks like we are running out of time,” he says deadpan. The publicist has been in and out several times now to end it. But he has been enjoying himself he says. Two more questions, I say, one simple, one less. “Let’s start with the less simple one,” he says, consciously unpredictable.

When you are in a relationship do you prefer to be the person who loves most or is loved most? He rocks back in his chair thinking. “I don’t know if it ever works quite that way because the ambition is for it to be equal. That’s the thing that keeps you in it.” But it’s never equal. He doesn’t disagree, continues thinking. Not tensely or avoiding the question, but wanting to give the right answer. “I think there is only one appropriate answer and that is to be the person who loves the most. That gives you the greatest potential to be loved.” Some people define themselves by their capacity to feel. Some people by their need to receive. “Yes, but I don’t think I could make it either way if it was just that for a length of time, although I understand both emotional positions and I think I have been there in both of them. I don’t fall in love easily but when I do, by God, I both have the need and expectation for it to be equal. Now can I have the easy one please?”

What characteristics of your parents have you inherited? “My father’s work ethic and my mother’s insecurities. My father is Irish and my mother is Jewish. The only thing that held the family together is that they were both Democrats, so I was raised Democrat.” His eyes twinkle when remembering his parents.jm

“It was a great upbringing.” Challenging perhaps? “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he says looking at me, giving me one final quizzical look, making those words seem real and not a cliche. It’s as if he wants me to wonder what it was that didn’t kill him, or maybe he’s just looking at my hair. I’m not sure if goodbye is going to be a smile or a handshake but it turns out to be a hug, a firm all embracing one. I feel a tingling going up and down my entire body. When I leave the room I realise I have blushed from the inside out. Whatever he’s learned, whatever he’s lost, whatever he closes or opens, you felt a real person in that hug, not necessarily one that always wants to be invisible.

The first 20 minutes of Flight are possibly the most adrenalin spiked 20 minutes in film. We see Denzel Washington wake up in his crumpled hotel room. We see the gorgeous naked woman he’s just spent the night with. He gets up. We see his body a little too soft, a little too juicy. His hair a little too long, a little too springy. Then we see him take a line of cocaine.

This little scene is not shocking in itself. It is shocking because it is Denzel Washington. We don’t see him do sex and drugs and rock and roll. We see him as political martyr Malcolm X, freedom fighter Steve Biko, the Zen-like boxer Ruben Carter in Hurricane. We see him saving the train in Pelham 123 and the beyond ruthless CIA agent turned traitor in Safe House.

He’s played the good, the bad, the conflicted, but it’s a long time since we’ve seen him get out of bed naked. Then comes a further jolt. We see him put on his pilot’s uniform, and that his girlfriend is the flight attendant.

We see them board the plane. We see weather, turbulence. We see him down the vodka just before the plane’s hydraulic system fails.

We see him turn the plane upside down and fly it. You watch it heart in throat. It’s Denzel Washington, he’s the hero, he’s going to survive. Right?

Then it becomes clear that’s not the story. It’s not about him being a hero, it’s about an act of God that wrecked the plane and changed his life forever. It’s about love, truth, redemption. Stories that Denzel knows how to tell best and weave them into your heart and soul.

When we meet in a Beverly Hills hotel room he’s looking bright eyed, sparkling eyed even. His skin is fresh and he’s lean and strong in a navy sweater and dark jeans. His smile lights up the room as it does the screen.

He is sitting in an oversized overstuffed armchair with a high back. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on a throne here.’ He is king after all. ‘No I’m not,’ he retorts quickly but purposefully. ‘I just like the chair. It’s a kind of Richard III thing.’

These days he’s all about Shakespeare and the theatre. In 2010 he did the play Fences on Broadway with Viola Davis. He started off as a stage actor in New York. That going back to his roots revitalised him.

‘It did. You know as we mature – well hopefully mature – as we get older, hopefully we get wiser and you start to realise how many shots do I have left? And the experience of working with Viola on Broadway was such a thrill. Watching her I realised I’m fighting for my life out there with this brilliant actress. The whole process is where I am in my life right now. It reawakened me. I felt alive again and I said I want to apply that same work ethic to every job in terms of preparation, investigation, everything. I’d said to myself I want to work hard and I want to do things the right way and I want to have the feeling that this is not just another gig.’

For Washington, now 57, there have been many gigs that seem from the outside not just another gig. His performances are consistently acclaimed. He is box office nectar. He has had multiple Oscar nominations and won twice, first Best Supporting Actor in the Civil War drama Glory in 1989 and then in 2001 for Training Day, where he played narcotics detective Alonso Harris who breaks the law he is supposed to enforce.

He is drawn to ambiguous characters, bad guys who are vulnerable and vice versa. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him turn in a bad performance or a bad review. There has never been a bad period or a lull. He has kept on form. Recent movies Unstoppable and Safe House, have been box office thrillers.

The movies would have been good on their own. It was Washington who made them viable. You never see him acting. He is always effortless, considered, magnetic. Or that’s how he comes over.

On the inside perhaps he felt complacent. ‘No matter how big a movie is, I never want it to be just another gig. I don’t want that. Don’t want to know.’

He savours words and he looks right at you. He misses no detail. Not even a smell goes unchecked. He notices that I’m wearing the same perfume, Carnal Flower, as the last time we met a couple of years ago.

Perhaps his recent questioning of how many shots was highlighted by the shock suicide in August of his friend Tony Scott, director of Crimson Tide, Man On Fire, Déjà Vu, Pelham 123 and Unstoppable.

‘I made five movies with him. I talked to him about a week before he died about our sixth movie. He wanted to do a film where I played a submarine captain driving a submarine filled with narcotics. We were talking about it.’

Were there any clues as to his state of mind? ‘No.’ He shakes his head emphatically. His eyes flash with a kind of urgency to recall everything exactly.

‘First of all I’ve never been in a situation like this where you start to backtrack. You think what they said to you. You think what you said. And then a week later they kill themselves. You might think it was something that I did. You know what I mean, you don’t know, you don’t see it coming. I don’t know what was going on in his life.’

He was depressed? ‘Something. Obviously.’

Shortly after the news there were some reports that he had cancer that was terminal and these were quickly denied. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I haven’t talked to anyone who said that he was ill.’

Sharp intake of breath. ‘The Scott brothers,’ he says, almost like it’s a prayer. It is certainly said with reverence and bewilderment.

He says of the Tony Scott submarine project. ‘I wouldn’t touch it now. Not without him.’ Next up he has a film 2 Guns with Mark Wahlberg. ‘We were just acting stupid basically. It’s the first time I’ve ever acted stupid. We’ll see what happens.’

People don’t expect him to act stupid. They expect gravitas. ‘Exactly. Choosing parts after a great play like Fences and then to do such a dark guy like in Safe House, you just want to do something silly.’ Washington has never wanted to be pinned down as one thing. He dislikes boxes and labels.

He was born in 1954 in Mount Vernon, New York, a mostly middle class suburb. His father was a preacher who worked for the water company in the day and a security guard at night and preached in between. His mother, who was by all accounts feisty and formidable, ran beauty salons. His parents divorced when he was 14, which coincided, with his own teenage middle child (of three) rebellious phase. For a while he hung out with a bad crowd.

His mother sent him away to boarding school where he rebelled further but turned himself around in order to go to college to study medicine. Then he changed to political science. Then law and finally he found that he was good at acting and that’s what he stuck with.

Not that he wanted to recommend the profession to his daughter who is studying at NYU. She did a small part in her first film (with Precious director Lee Daniels) in the summer. He looks protective when he talks about her.

Is it exciting or worrying for him to see her going into the acting profession? ‘It’s interesting. In her senior year at high school she was working on her audition and LaTanya Richardson, who is Sam Jackson’s wife and a brilliant actress in her own right, was working with her, and I said, “Alright Olivia, I want to see your two pieces” and she went on the floor and went all dramatic and she said, “Oh dad.” And I said, “Come on now. Nobody’s going to be tougher than me. I’m going to tell you the truth because I’d rather you’d be a little hurt if you don’t have what it takes than have a lifetime of pain.”

‘She did the two pieces and right away I said do them again. She did them again and I said, “OK. Here’s the bad news. This is one of the toughest profession’s you’re ever going to try to do. The bad news is you are very good. You are very good and you have what it takes. I can see that already.” I would never have said that if I hadn’t meant it. I put on my director’s hat and watch a young actor audition. And she was good.’ He says it almost wishing it had been easier.

He directed Antwone Fisher (2002) and The Great Debaters (2007) and is preparing to direct again. ‘I don’t know exactly what it is yet. It’s not set and I don’t want to jinx it.’

As an actor he intellectualises his role way ahead of time. Flight director Robert Zemeckis says, ‘He arrived very prepared.’

For Safe House he wanted to experience the torture of water boarding in real life. “I wanted to see what it would be like. It’s strange. You can’t breathe in, because the water comes in, and it’s filling up your mouth,” said Washington. “And that was just one time for a short time. Imagine having that done for 20, 30 seconds? You will give up the answers! You may not necessarily tell the truth, but you will tell [your captors] whatever they want to hear.”

So how did he prepare to be an alcoholic pilot? I gesture to the hotel suite minibar. ‘Did he check in and drink the minibar? ‘No, nothing like that. In fact I did absolutely not drink the entire picture. Normally I might have a glass of wine after work or something like that. But on this one I was afraid I might get too into it, and I just wanted to be clear. I want to give 100 per cent of myself and I want to be focused.’

How foolish of me to think that to get into the part of a man who loves to drink would involve some method drinking. ‘Nothing would have been worse than drinking on the set. And then you might think you were good and you’d be awful.’

Instead he went into the flight simulator. Listened to pilots talking. Didn’t ask them questions about drinking but typed “worse drunks of all time’ into YouTube and looked at the guys telling themselves they were absolutely fine as they fell over.

He gained weight for the part so the puffiness would look like it was bloating from alcohol. ‘I ate a lot. I ate what I wanted and I ate late at night. I would come home from work. I didn’t over eat. But if I wanted a hamburger and fries and shake and a piece of apple pie with ice cream on it I had it.’

And he’d normally eat like that once a week? ‘Less. But I knew this was a man who drank and did drugs. He’s not going to be going to the gym and he’s going to be not sleeping enough.

‘In the opening scene, in the bed I wanted my gut to be hanging out. I wanted to get up and my behind be sticking out when I was sniffing coke, smoking cigarettes and drinking. You’ve got to go there because that’s who he is. There’s no cute version.’

We see Washington playing a man in conflict impeccably. He is both a hero and a man on self-destruct. We haven’t seen Washington quite like that before. His eyes light up. ‘Great. I hope people say we haven’t seen Denzel like that.’ Once again delighted that neither he nor his character has been pinned down.

‘I don’t categorise. People want to put you in things. He is a complicated man. It’s a complicated movie. You can’t just stand on one side or the other.’

Talking to Washington happens on many levels too. He is chatty, he is jokey, he is relaxed, but he too is complicated. He doesn’t go to Hollywood premieres. You never see him in the gossip columns. He’s been married to his wife Pauletta for 29 years and 17 years ago they renewed their vows in front of Archbishop Tutu in South Africa. He doesn’t talk much about his wife although he never specifically says he’s not going to talk about her. In all he has four children, John David, Katia, and twins Olivia and Malcolm.

Flight is also a love story, and again we haven’t seen Washington in one of those for a while. The scenes between his character Whip Whitaker and Kelly Reilly’s character Nicole are intensely tender, intensely troubled. It’s another level to the movie that makes it not just another gig. I’ve rarely seen him so vulnerable.

‘Really?’ His eyes open wide. ‘I didn’t think about it as vulnerable. I’m playing the part, so I’m not thinking oh, I’m going to be vulnerable.’ Washington often refers to the fact that he wasn’t thinking, that he’s done something instinctively. Yet on another level he is thinking all the time, always on.

‘I do have one regret. I should have slobbered more and been more pathetic in the scene where he curses her. Maybe I did do it that way and Bob didn’t use it.’

He can’t remember how he played the part because he was so lost in it. You wonder how far apart these characters are. Washington so sparkly, so handsome, so professional. And a man unravelling in his own self-destruction and alcoholism.

Has he ever had an addictive personality? ‘I’m still here! I think we all have some point in our lives where we’ve gone too far and you have to come back. Any time you’ve got into a car and you’ve had too much to drink and you put other people’s lives at risk. I’m not going to tell you I’ve not been guilty of that in my life, especially in my youth. Obviously nothing like this guy, I wouldn’t want to be that guy.’

Flight questions how alcoholics survive by telling lies. There is a moment where if his character tells one more lie it would save him and doom him in equal parts. If he lies he gets away with it.

Has Washington ever had a situation like that where he had to decide if he should lie? ‘Nothing to this level. More like if I lied to my mum I might not get told off. I do remember when I was a little kid I stayed out way too late and it’s probably why I started acting. I knew I was going to get a whipping when I got home.

‘I stopped outside the door of the house and I could hear my mother and father in the kitchen so I actually ripped my shirt, put spit under my eyes, messed up my hair. I was already messed up because I’d been out most of the night. But I came in…’

He puts on a fake sobbing tone. ‘And I went through a whole business (of how he’d been attacked) and my mother said “You see, that’s what you get for staying out late. Now go in to the bathroom and clean yourself up and come in and sit down and eat.” And I remember looking into the mirror and thinking, “Ha, maybe I should try this again.” Maybe while I was in there my mum was thinking “That little knuckle head thinking he was fooling us.” I don’t know, but yes, I got away with it.
And fortunately for us, Washington is still getting away with it.

Everything Denzel Washington says is said with incredible force, warmth, and he savours every word. He is in his suite at the Four Seasons, Beverly Hills. I arrive as room service leaves. He perches over his lunch of a giant juicy steak. He’s just cut a chunk. It’s hovering on the end of his fork just about to go into his mouth and he decides to inhale me instead.

“What are you smelling of? You smell like a lei, Hawaiian flowers, the one beginning with a g.” He opens his mouth and his nostrils at the same time. Shoves the piece of steak in and chews heartily. “Mm, it’s the g flower, the gardenia one. Isn’t it?,” he says excitedly.

“It’s called Carnal Flowers,” I tell him.

“Carnal flowers,” he says, salivating and cutting off another piece of steak. He’s very excited. And his excitement is somehow infectious. He likes to play around. He likes to joke, even though of course he takes his craft ultra seriously with an absolute eye for the minutest detail. And I wonder if the overt smelling was a reference to the movie Deja Vu where smelling is an intricate part. If you smell something it’s a trigger, it can take you back. If you smell something you feel it, you’re in the real world, you’ve not slipped down a wormhole as he does in the movie.

Deja Vu is a murder mystery, an understated romance, the ultimate surveillance that involves time travel. “I don’t know where I got that smelling thing from. I think I just did it and Tony Scott said yeh, do that some more.”

In the movie it was as if he needed to smell to feel he was real. “It’s about using all the senses, not relying on what you see, what you hear, what you smell and ultimately what you feel”

You get the impression that Denzel Washington has the hugest capacity to feel. Everything he does is filled with a raw and deep emotion, even just chewing his steak. The ultimate guy’s guy that is also super sensitive. Tall, sharp, funny. The overriding sense you get from him is that he is super protective – of himself, if you go in too far too deep too soon he doesn’t like that. Of his family, particularly his daughters. Of his co-star Paula Patton in Deja Vu. His whole protectiveness elevates the story from one of a simple thriller to something that is personal, intimate, something that really matters. He is even protective of me. The last time we met I was almost passing out with pain (stomach cramps). He was more like a doctor than an actor in that interview. You tell him these things and he doesn’t like compliments. I tell him that he came over as such a force of shiny protection. “Well I did not think I was shiny and protective. Thankyou, but that’s not how I see myself. Maybe I could have played that part in a different way, like a dirty twisted old man. Maybe that’s a different movie. Maybe it was just that Tony made a really good choice in Paula because she’s a real sweet person and that comes across. You want to protect her. Me, protective person? Hm. Yeh, yeh, yeh. All this as I eat my steak. Well you know it’s coming up to Thanksgiving. Get turkey for the next five days. Got to get my steak in now.”

He likes to present a thin facade of machismo. Wrap himself up in it, but he knows it’s easily unravelled. Even when he played the brutal narcotics detective Alonzo Harris in Training Day there was something wounded about him. That’s what makes Denzel a great actor. You don’t feel for him, you feel with him. As Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter the boxer wrongly accused of murder in The Hurricane his sweet stoicism made you cry and got him an Oscar nod. This kind of emoting the audience first became apparent when he inhabited the role of Steve Biko in Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom in 1987. A whole slew of films Man On Fire, Manchurian Candidate, Inside Man have all demonstrated Washington’s capacity for toughness with an undercurrent of vulnerability. He is complex and instantly accessible, was once called “so handsome he should be illegal” and he is of course deliciously handsome. And here he is right in front of me smelling me, if somewhat ostentatiously, just because he knows it will amuse me. He knows how to get right to you. He knows how to carry you along.

In Deja Vu you are left contemplating the universe and every relationship you’ve ever had. Deja Vu is in itself a bonding phenomenon. Everyone’s had that flash that you meet someone new and feel you’ve known them all your life, feel inexplicably in love with a stranger. In the movie flipping back in time is possible, and that’s how deja vu is defined, that you have been there before. It raises the question, if you could do it all again could you, would you. In real life deja vu is a trick of the mind, is it a dream. In the movie it involves an extreme form of surveillance where you look at something and as you’re looking at it you can travel in time. It involves the highly complex notion of the parallel universe and slipping down wormholes into alternative dimensions where the same thing is going on but just a little earlier. If you have the power to slip into that dimension do you have the power to change it.

“Be careful what you ask for,” Washington wags his finger.
The movie’s convolutedness and complex science are made tangible by Washington’s very fleshy, sensuous performance. He’s an ATF (Tobacco and Firearms Agent), he’s an everyman. You figure it out with him. He’s good at taking you on journeys.

I tell him, ‘You must have had deja vu moments with a string of interviewers asking you what is your favourite deja vu moment?’ “Aha, ha, ha. I usually turn it on its ear and ask them the question back.”

Typical Washington, he’s always more interested in asking the questions. He has an insatiable curiosity as well as a liking to duck and dive.

“Scientists talk about how we use only ten per cent of our brain. What is the other 90 per cent doing? That’s where the intuition, the feelings, the deja vus, all that stuff. It goes there. I think as we advance our interactive skills, our information skills, our brain is getting weaker and weaker because it doesn’t imagine. Like your mother would tell you a story and you would imagine all the characters. If you listen to the radio or read a book you make the movie in your head. Now it’s all given to you on a plate. You have a television with 500 channels. The muscles in the brain are getting weaker.

“Maybe deja vu is some sort of intuition. You feel you know this person well. It’s as if you’ve met them before but you’ve just intuited who they are.”

I tell him I’ve always thought his powers of intuition have been strong. “What do you mean?” He’s almost shrieking, offended. I feel you intuit a part, a person, you’re always looking for different angles, always asking questions, curious, it’s like you’re switched on the whole time.

“Ah,” he says. “I think I’ve worked on developing that muscle. One spiritual journey develops that muscle. I’ve gone through the eastern philosophies, Christianity, Buddhism, Swamis, and back to Christianity and Islam. Just searching. I mean Siddharta by Herman Hesse is my favourite book because he was walking the earth, praying, searching. I kind of had that vibe and curiosity. It leads you to your own philosophy, like working on what that 90 per cent of your brain is doing.

“Is it OK to be a searcher and a carnivore?” he says. Maybe he isn’t sure of how the extremely spiritual side of him fits with the grounded, the basic. And maybe that’s the key to him. It’s a key that he doesn’t want me to find. He hates being analysed. “We don’t understand oxygen but we keep breathing.

“I think if this movie is about anything it’s about if you could change anything would you. Doing this movie shows me that I would not want to do that because of the domino effect. If you changed one thing how would you change another.”

It’s not that Denzel Washington had a charmed life that makes him think he would not want to change anything, but there’s a determination about him and a stoicism that makes him work hard for what he wants and a spiritual side that makes him accept what he doesn’t get. He’s not your typical movie star. He doesn’t love glamour or bling. I’ve read that his wife had to persuade him to upgrade his car into something a little fancy at a time when he could have gone plushy luxury. Recently a friend of mine was in her local video shop. Browsing among the shelves she found a random man and asked him to recommend something. They were out of his first recommendation The Da Vinci Code so he went with Inside Man and when she got it home she realised that the man recommending it was the star of the movie. So there’s a Hollywood rarity, he goes to the video shop himself.

He was born in 1954 in Mount Vernon, New York, a mostly middle class mostly white suburb. His father was a preacher who worked for the water company in the day and as a security guard at night and preached in between. His mother, a formidable figure, ran beauty salons. His parents divorced when he was 14, which coincided with his own teenage middle child (of three) rebellious phase. He was a keyboardist in a band with three friends who all ended up serving time. It was one of those fork in the road moments. His mother, upon the recommendation of a school’s career officer, who felt he was intelligent and had a chance of a career, sent him away to boarding school where he found a group of bad boys who could afford to buy drugs. He’d never touched a drug or drink before that. Despite the potential bad influence he did well, went to college to study medicine, then changed to political science, then he thought he might be a lawyer, and then he found he could act and potentially be all of the above, or at least have the experience of feeling what it would be like to be them.

I wonder if he is most like his devout preacher father who hardly ever watched a movie, or his tough love mother. “Similar? You might have to ask my mother that. He’s gone,” he says in a whisper. His father died 15 years ago. “I wouldn’t dare say.” Back in Denzel boom he says, “Closer to, that’s different to similar to, isn’t it. I would say that the mother is the one that is there so you are always going to be closer to your mother. My own children are probably closer to my wife. They have spent more time with her. She knows them better. That’s the way it is in most homes.”

His oldest boy John David is 22 and a football player with the St. Louis Rams. Katia has just turned 19 and Malcolm and Olivia are 15-year old twins. “Maybe it’s chauvinistic, sexist, but I don’t worry about my son the football player. He’s out of the house, he can take care of himself. But with my oldest daughter, she’s away at college but she came home for the holidays. I couldn’t sleep, it was two in the morning, I was going down the corridor. Was her car there, was she in her room? If she’s at college I know she’s staying out late but I don’t think about it. When she came home it seemed to pick up right where she left off. But yeh, I would say that my parents were protective and controlling when they needed to be. And of course I’m a protective parent.”

He’s also a protective partner. It’s been said before that he doesn’t easily do love scenes and never would want to show them to the public before his wife of 25 years Pauletta could see even a kiss first. Twelve years ago they renewed their vows in front of Archbishop Tutu and then a gathering at Nelson Mandela’s house. He says that stories about his unwillingness to take his shirt off have certainly been exaggerated. In Deja Vu though the romance is all the more powerful for being underplayed.

“I think it’s sexier that way. We could have been jumping on the mattress every ten minutes, but that wouldn’t have been right. It wasn’t even scripted that I kissed her, I just did it and that was enough. I mean, my character has just saved her life a few hours ago, I think it’s much more romantic and more interesting to be about what you don’t do. I love a big part of this film was a love story in reverse. My character meets her when she’s dead and he tries to treat her like just a piece of evidence, the body, but as things unfold he gets the chance to watch her live and be with her watching her for days.”

Do you think watching somebody is about protecting or controlling? “Oh, I think there’s a thin line, but in the film he’s not controlling because he has no idea he can actually do anything about it.”

What makes his character and Denzel himself have an extra edge of charisma is that there is always the potential for darkness as well as sweetness. This is the third time he has worked with director Tony Scott and when he cast him as the former FBI agent who liked to get maudlin at the bottom of a bottle in Man On Fire he said that he thought Denzel had a dark and obsessive side.

“Dark, obsessive, sweet, protective? I don’t work with any of that. I’m neither. I’m me. I do a job, I interpret a role. I think we all are those things at the same time and I don’t think, ooh, let me access the sweet now. It’s not like I’ve got 12 different things I can do and I’ve got to work off one. There’s several of them going on now in this interview. I am sensitive, intuitive, there’s a dark obsessive side, and a carnivore. That’s trying to pin me down. Mm, carnal flowers, that’s who I am. No, if I were a perfume it wouldn’t have a title, I wouldn’t name it anything.”

What would it smell of? What note would it have? “Minor chords,” he nods. “Minor chords.” he still plays music, “but not enough. I’ve been listening to this girl Ayo and she has a song that she sings about her father and how she did not understand the sacrifices he made when she was growing up. With the song she apologises for the hard times she gave him. It doesn’t specifically make me think of my father, although he did make sacrifices, it makes me think more of my daughters. But I just liked the song because I like bluesy darker songs. First you think it’s about one thing and then it becomes about something else.”

The movie Deja Vu was shot in New Orleans, the first movie to be shot there since Hurricane Katrina. “I was here in LA for the Northridge earthquake. I know the feeling of destruction, of a place being just empty and a whole community traumatised. Where is everybody? Everybody’s gone. Empty houses and cars stuck up trees. Tony had initially felt the movie would work there so obviously I said let’s get back there. We spent tens of millions of dollars, hired local people, stayed in hotels, so it was good to be a small part of giving something back.”

You imagine him being driven by wanting to be good yet he has never been active in politics, never wanted to define himself as any kind of role model. Have you ever considered getting politically involved. “No,” he says insistently. “I vote, I pay taxes. One has to realise one’s limitations. I don’t just want to do things because I’m famous.” He is however committed to an involvement with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. “I do support other things but I stick with that one because I’m like, hey, let me get one thing right. We’ve gone from 2.2 million to 5.7 million children that we take care of around the world, from 2,000 clubs to 45,000 clubs.”

He says that a boys club helped shape and guide him in his childhood. He may say he’s not political but if he can do something he does. Next up is the movie American Gangster directed by Ridley Scott. It’s set in Vietnam and it’s about a drug lord smuggling heroin into Harlem in the 1970s by hiding stash in the coffins of American soldiers returning from the conflict. He’s still suffering a bit of jet lag from filming in Thailand but says he doesn’t want to talk about that movie. He doesn’t want to talk about his next directing project. “I just want to get it done before I chit chat too much about it. I want to make sure it happens before I talk about it.” His first directing project was Antwone Fisher which dealt with a boy’s physical abuse. It was well received but not an enormous box office success. “I thought be careful what you ask for. Before it happened I was terrified, couldn’t sleep, had to see a chiropractor. I thought it was the scariest thing I’d ever done. Once it started I really enjoyed it. It’s all about jumping into the water and having faith.”

Are you scared about anything else outside work? “Did I say I was scared of anything?” OK, sorry, what excites you then? “My children. That’s much more exciting than going to work. Watching them grow, finding out what they’re all doing. But you know Paula Patton reminded me of what being scared and excited in this business really meant. I’ve made a few films, been in the business a while, some thirty something red carpets, when you meet someone for whom it’s all new you realise how fortunate you are to be in this position where you are actually jaded. It was also a good reminder that fear is good. A healthy scare is good.”

He may not like to be analysed. He loves to analyse other people. He wonders what it would be like if he had to play me in a movie. I ask him would he do that? “With love and tenderness. Get in contact with my feminine side. I wouldn’t even worry about finding out about you the journalist. I would like to find out about the you inside, the you that you left behind. I’d want to get the smell right. I don’t think guys care about smell. We have two smells, good and mm, I don’t know. You were asking me what were you feeling what were you thinking. A man does not want to think that much.” This man may say he doesn’t think very much, but he thinks very intensely all the time.

Everything Denzel Washington says is said with incredible force, warmth, and he savours every word. He is in his suite at the Four Seasons, Beverly Hills. I arrive as room service leaves. He perches over his lunch of a giant juicy steak. He’s just cut a chunk. It’s hovering on the end of his fork just about to go into his mouth and he decides to inhale me instead.

“What are you smelling of? You smell like a lei, Hawaiian flowers, the one beginning with a g.” He opens his mouth and his nostrils at the same time. Shoves the piece of steak in and chews heartily. “Mm, it’s the g flower, the gardenia one. Isn’t it?,” he says excitedly.

“It’s called Carnal Flowers,” I tell him.

“Carnal flowers,” he says, salivating and cutting off another piece of steak. He’s very excited. And his excitement is somehow infectious. He likes to play around. He likes to joke, even though of course he takes his craft ultra seriously with an absolute eye for the minutest detail. And I wonder if the overt smelling was a reference to the movie Deja Vu where smelling is an intricate part. If you smell something it’s a trigger, it can take you back. If you smell something you feel it, you’re in the real world, you’ve not slipped down a wormhole as he does in the movie.

Deja Vu is a murder mystery, an understated romance, the ultimate surveillance that involves time travel. “I don’t know where I got that smelling thing from. I think I just did it and Tony Scott said yeh, do that some more.”

In the movie it was as if he needed to smell to feel he was real. “It’s about using all the senses, not relying on what you see, what you hear, what you smell and ultimately what you feel.

You get the impression that Denzel Washington has the hugest capacity to feel. Everything he does is filled with a raw and deep emotion, even just chewing his steak. The ultimate guy’s guy that is also super sensitive. Tall, sharp, funny. The overriding sense you get from him is that he is super protective – of himself, if you go in too far too deep too soon he doesn’t like that. Of his family, particularly his daughters. Of his co-star Paula Patton in Deja Vu. His whole protectiveness elevates the story from one of a simple thriller to something that is personal, intimate, something that really matters. He is even protective of me. The last time we met I was almost passing out with pain (stomach cramps). He was more like a doctor than an actor in that interview. You tell him these things and he doesn’t like compliments. I tell him that he came over as such a force of shiny protection. “Well I did not think I was shiny and protective. Thankyou, but that’s not how I see myself. Maybe I could have played that part in a different way, like a dirty twisted old man. Maybe that’s a different movie. Maybe it was just that Tony made a really good choice in Paula because she’s a real sweet person and that comes across. You want to protect her. Me, protective person? Hm. Yeh, yeh, yeh. All this as I eat my steak. Well you know it’s coming up to Thanksgiving. Get turkey for the next five days. Got to get my steak in now.”

He likes to present a thin facade of machismo. Wrap himself up in it, but he knows it’s easily unravelled. Even when he played the brutal narcotics detective Alonzo Harris in Training Day there was something wounded about him. That’s what makes Denzel a great actor. You don’t feel for him, you feel with him. As Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter the boxer wrongly accused of murder in The Hurricane his sweet stoicism made you cry and got him an Oscar nod. This kind of emoting the audience first became apparent when he inhabited the role of Steve Biko in Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom in 1987. A whole slew of films Man On Fire, Manchurian Candidate, Inside Man have all demonstrated Washington’s capacity for toughness with an undercurrent of vulnerability. He is complex and instantly accessible, was once called “so handsome he should be illegal” and he is of course deliciously handsome. And here he is right in front of me smelling me, if somewhat ostentatiously, just because he knows it will amuse me. He knows how to get right to you. He knows how to carry you along.

In Deja Vu you are left contemplating the universe and every relationship you’ve ever had. Deja Vu is in itself a bonding phenomenon. Everyone’s had that flash that you meet someone new and feel you’ve known them all your life, feel inexplicably in love with a stranger. In the movie flipping back in time is possible, and that’s how deja vu is defined, that you have been there before. It raises the question, if you could do it all again could you, would you. In real life deja vu is a trick of the mind, is it a dream. In the movie it involves an extreme form of surveillance where you look at something and as you’re looking at it you can travel in time. It involves the highly complex notion of the parallel universe and slipping down wormholes into alternative dimensions where the same thing is going on but just a little earlier. If you have the power to slip into that dimension do you have the power to change it.

“Be careful what you ask for,” Washington wags his finger.

The movie’s convolutedness and complex science are made tangible by Washington’s very fleshy, sensuous performance. He’s an ATF (Tobacco and Firearms Agent), he’s an everyman. You figure it out with him. He’s good at taking you on journeys.

I tell him, ‘You must have had deja vu moments with a string of interviewers asking you what is your favourite deja vu moment?’ “Aha, ha, ha. I usually turn it on its ear and ask them the question back.”

Typical Washington, he’s always more interested in asking the questions. He has an insatiable curiosity as well as a liking to duck and dive.

“Scientists talk about how we use only ten per cent of our brain. What is the other 90 per cent doing? That’s where the intuition, the feelings, the deja vus, all that stuff. It goes there. I think as we advance our interactive skills, our information skills, our brain is getting weaker and weaker because it doesn’t imagine. Like your mother would tell you a story and you would imagine all the characters. If you listen to the radio or read a book you make the movie in your head. Now it’s all given to you on a plate. You have a television with 500 channels. The muscles in the brain are getting weaker.

“Maybe deja vu is some sort of intuition. You feel you know this person well. It’s as if you’ve met them before but you’ve just intuited who they are.”

I tell him I’ve always thought his powers of intuition have been strong. “What do you mean?” He’s almost shrieking, offended. I feel you intuit a part, a person, you’re always looking for different angles, always asking questions, curious, it’s like you’re switched on the whole time.

“Ah,” he says. “I think I’ve worked on developing that muscle. One spiritual journey develops that muscle. I’ve gone through the eastern philosophies, Christianity, Buddhism, Swamis, and back to Christianity and Islam. Just searching. I mean Siddharta by Herman Hesse is my favourite book because he was walking the earth, praying, searching. I kind of had that vibe and curiosity. It leads you to your own philosophy, like working on what that 90 per cent of your brain is doing.

“Is it OK to be a searcher and a carnivore?” he says. Maybe he isn’t sure of how the extremely spiritual side of him fits with the grounded, the basic. And maybe that’s the key to him. It’s a key that he doesn’t want me to find. He hates being analysed. “We don’t understand oxygen but we keep breathing.

“I think if this movie is about anything it’s about if you could change anything would you. Doing this movie shows me that I would not want to do that because of the domino effect. If you changed one thing how would you change another.”

It’s not that Denzel Washington had a charmed life that makes him think he would not want to change anything, but there’s a determination about him and a stoicism that makes him work hard for what he wants and a spiritual side that makes him accept what he doesn’t get. He’s not your typical movie star. He doesn’t love glamour or bling. I’ve read that his wife had to persuade him to upgrade his car into something a little fancy at a time when he could have gone plushy luxury. Recently a friend of mine was in her local video shop. Browsing among the shelves she found a random man and asked him to recommend something. They were out of his first recommendation The Da Vinci Code so he went with Inside Man and when she got it home she realised that the man recommending it was the star of the movie. So there’s a Hollywood rarity, he goes to the video shop himself.

He was born in 1954 in Mount Vernon, New York, a mostly middle class mostly white suburb. His father was a preacher who worked for the water company in the day and as a security guard at night and preached in between. His mother, a formidable figure, ran beauty salons. His parents divorced when he was 14, which coincided with his own teenage middle child (of three) rebellious phase. He was a keyboardist in a band with three friends who all ended up serving time. It was one of those fork in the road moments. His mother, upon the recommendation of a school’s career officer, who felt he was intelligent and had a chance of a career, sent him away to boarding school where he found a group of bad boys who could afford to buy drugs. He’d never touched a drug or drink before that. Despite the potential bad influence he did well, went to college to study medicine, then changed to political science, then he thought he might be a lawyer, and then he found he could act and potentially be all of the above, or at least have the experience of feeling what it would be like to be them.

I wonder if he is most like his devout preacher father who hardly ever watched a movie, or his tough love mother. “Similar? You might have to ask my mother that. He’s gone,” he says in a whisper. His father died 15 years ago. “I wouldn’t dare say.” Back in Denzel boom he says, “Closer to, that’s different to similar to, isn’t it. I would say that the mother is the one that is there so you are always going to be closer to your mother. My own children are probably closer to my wife. They have spent more time with her. She knows them better. That’s the way it is in most homes.”

His oldest boy John David is 22 and a football player with the St. Louis Rams. Katia has just turned 19 and Malcolm and Olivia are 15-year old twins. “Maybe it’s chauvinistic, sexist, but I don’t worry about my son the football player. He’s out of the house, he can take care of himself. But with my oldest daughter, she’s away at college but she came home for the holidays. I couldn’t sleep, it was two in the morning, I was going down the corridor. Was her car there, was she in her room? If she’s at college I know she’s staying out late but I don’t think about it. When she came home it seemed to pick up right where she left off. But yeh, I would say that my parents were protective and controlling when they needed to be. And of course I’m a protective parent.”

He’s also a protective partner. It’s been said before that he doesn’t easily do love scenes and never would want to show them to the public before his wife of 25 years Pauletta could see even a kiss first. Twelve years ago they renewed their vows in front of Archbishop Tutu and then a gathering at Nelson Mandela’s house. He says that stories about his unwillingness to take his shirt off have certainly been exaggerated. In Deja Vu though the romance is all the more powerful for being underplayed.

“I think it’s sexier that way. We could have been jumping on the mattress every ten minutes, but that wouldn’t have been right. It wasn’t even scripted that I kissed her, I just did it and that was enough. I mean, my character has just saved her life a few hours ago, I think it’s much more romantic and more interesting to be about what you don’t do. I love a big part of this film was a love story in reverse. My character meets her when she’s dead and he tries to treat her like just a piece of evidence, the body, but as things unfold he gets the chance to watch her live and be with her watching her for days.”

Do you think watching somebody is about protecting or controlling? “Oh, I think there’s a thin line, but in the film he’s not controlling because he has no idea he can actually do anything about it.”

What makes his character and Denzel himself have an extra edge of charisma is that there is always the potential for darkness as well as sweetness. This is the third time he has worked with director Tony Scott and when he cast him as the former FBI agent who liked to get maudlin at the bottom of a bottle in Man On Fire he said that he thought Denzel had a dark and obsessive side.

“Dark, obsessive, sweet, protective? I don’t work with any of that. I’m neither. I’m me. I do a job, I interpret a role. I think we all are those things at the same time and I don’t think, ooh, let me access the sweet now. It’s not like I’ve got 12 different things I can do and I’ve got to work off one. There’s several of them going on now in this interview. I am sensitive, intuitive, there’s a dark obsessive side, and a carnivore. That’s trying to pin me down. Mm, carnal flowers, that’s who I am. No, if I were a perfume it wouldn’t have a title, I wouldn’t name it anything.”

What would it smell of? What note would it have? “Minor chords,” he nods. “Minor chords.” he still plays music, “but not enough. I’ve been listening to this girl Ayo and she has a song that she sings about her father and how she did not understand the sacrifices he made when she was growing up. With the song she apologises for the hard times she gave him. It doesn’t specifically make me think of my father, although he did make sacrifices, it makes me think more of my daughters. But I just liked the song because I like bluesy darker songs. First you think it’s about one thing and then it becomes about something else.”

The movie Deja Vu was shot in New Orleans, the first movie to be shot there since Hurricane Katrina. “I was here in LA for the Northridge earthquake. I know the feeling of destruction, of a place being just empty and a whole community traumatised. Where is everybody? Everybody’s gone. Empty houses and cars stuck up trees. Tony had initially felt the movie would work there so obviously I said let’s get back there. We spent tens of millions of dollars, hired local people, stayed in hotels, so it was good to be a small part of giving something back.”

You imagine him being driven by wanting to be good yet he has never been active in politics, never wanted to define himself as any kind of role model. Have you ever considered getting politically involved. “No,” he says insistently. “I vote, I pay taxes. One has to realise one’s limitations. I don’t just want to do things because I’m famous.” He is however committed to an involvement with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. “I do support other things but I stick with that one because I’m like, hey, let me get one thing right. We’ve gone from 2.2 million to 5.7 million children that we take care of around the world, from 2,000 clubs to 45,000 clubs.”

He says that a boys club helped shape and guide him in his childhood. He may say he’s not political but if he can do something he does. Next up is the movie American Gangster directed by Ridley Scott. It’s set in Vietnam and it’s about a drug lord smuggling heroin into Harlem in the 1970s by hiding stash in the coffins of American soldiers returning from the conflict. He’s still suffering a bit of jet lag from filming in Thailand but says he doesn’t want to talk about that movie. He doesn’t want to talk about his next directing project. “I just want to get it done before I chit chat too much about it. I want to make sure it happens before I talk about it.” His first directing project was Antwone Fisher which dealt with a boy’s physical abuse. It was well received but not an enormous box office success. “I thought be careful what you ask for. Before it happened I was terrified, couldn’t sleep, had to see a chiropractor. I thought it was the scariest thing I’d ever done. Once it started I really enjoyed it. It’s all about jumping into the water and having faith.”

Are you scared about anything else outside work? “Did I say I was scared of anything?” OK, sorry, what excites you then? “My children. That’s much more exciting than going to work. Watching them grow, finding out what they’re all doing. But you know Paula Patton reminded me of what being scared and excited in this business really meant. I’ve made a few films, been in the business a while, some thirty something red carpets, when you meet someone for whom it’s all new you realise how fortunate you are to be in this position where you are actually jaded. It was also a good reminder that fear is good. A healthy scare is good.”

He may not like to be analysed. He loves to analyse other people. He wonders what it would be like if he had to play me in a movie. I ask him would he do that? “With love and tenderness. Get in contact with my feminine side. I wouldn’t even worry about finding out about you the journalist. I would like to find out about the you inside, the you that you left behind. I’d want to get the smell right. I don’t think guys care about smell. We have two smells, good and mm, I don’t know. You were asking me what were you feeling what were you thinking. A man does not want to think that much.” This man may say he doesn’t think very much, but he thinks very intensely all the time.